• Doppler shift and refraction

    From Ned Latham@21:1/5 to Jonathan Thornburg on Mon Mar 30 22:23:55 2020
    [[Mod. note -- I apologise for the delay in processing this article,
    which the author posted on Saturday 2020-03-28.
    -- jt]]

    Jonathan Thornburg wrote:
    Net Latham asked:

    Has anyone ever measured any change in either frequency or wavelength
    in a beam of light between its traversal of a material of refractive
    index <= 1 and its further traversal of another material, one of
    refractive index > 1?

    In article <20200314174409.GA56566@iron.bkis-orchard.net>, I wrote
    As for direct measurements, I suspect microwaves in waveguides or
    coaxial cables would be the easiest. Measuring the speed & frequency
    of EM waves in a coaxial cable is a standard upper-level undergraduate physics experiment (I've done it), and directly measuring the wavelength would just need adding cable taps at various points along the cable
    to sample the passing EM field.

    Ned Latham then asked
    How did you deal with Total Internal Reflection?
    and
    Sample it, how?

    Thank you for the replies to those questions, Jonothan. They involve a
    matter related to this one, and I will be looking deeper into them later.

    For the present though, what I'm interested in is whether experimenters
    can meansure frequency of wavelength of light in optical cable (or a cable surrogate, like a 20m glass rod)?

    [[Mod. note -- Optical frequencies can be measured using frequency combs.
    This article
    https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/0-387-23791-7_7
    looks like a review of the technique, but alas it's paywalled. :( :(

    But, typing "optical frequency measurement" into scholar.google.com
    returned just over 3 million results just now; many of which have
    open-access copies available (look over in the right-hand column of
    the google-scholar search results for links to open-access pdfs).

    This Wikipedia article
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_frequency_comb
    describes generating optical frequency combs in various refractive media (silicon nitride, diamond, aluminum nitride, silicon).

    Measuring the wavelength is relatively straightforward, just requiring
    your favorite interferometer (Michelson, Fabry-Perot, Mach-Zehnder, etc.).
    -- jt]]

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