N-slit interferometer

The N-slit interferometer is an extension of the double-slit interferometer also known as Young's double-slit interferometer. One of the first known uses of N-slit arrays in optics was illustrated by Newton.[1] In the first part of the twentieth century, Michelson[2] described various cases of N-slit diffraction.

Feynman[3] described thought experiments the explored two-slit quantum interference of electrons, using Dirac's notation.[4] This approach was extended to N-slit interferometers, by Duarte and colleagues in 1989,[5] using narrow-linewidth laser illumination, that is, illumination by indistinguishable photons. The first application of the N-slit interferometer was the generation and measurement of complex interference patterns.[5][6] These interferograms are accurately reproduced, or predicted, by the N-slit interferometric equation for either even (N = 2, 4, 6,...), or odd (N = 3, 5, 7,...), numbers of slits.[6]

  1. ^ I. Newton, Opticks (Royal Society, London, 1704).
  2. ^ A. A. Michelson, Studies in Optics (Chicago University, Chicago, 1927).
  3. ^ R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. III (Addison Wesley, Reading, 1965).
  4. ^ P. A. M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, 4th Ed. (Oxford, London, 1978).
  5. ^ a b F. J. Duarte and D. J. Paine, Quantum mechanical description of N-slit interference phenomena, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Lasers '88, R. C. Sze and F. J. Duarte (Eds.) (STS, McLean, Va, 1989) pp. 42–47.
  6. ^ a b Duarte, F.J. (1993). "On a generalized interference equation and interferometric measurements". Optics Communications. 103 (1–2). Elsevier BV: 8–14. Bibcode:1993OptCo.103....8D. doi:10.1016/0030-4018(93)90634-h. ISSN 0030-4018.