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Honors for Aesthetic

Diffracted Beauty

The nature of visible light is fascinating, behaving simultaneously as a particle (photon) and a wave. Light undergoes various processes when it encounters an obstacle. These processes are seen in our everyday life and include various phenomena such as reflection, diffraction, and refraction.

In my photo, I observed light from a firework as it was diffracted. Diffraction occurs when a wave travels through or around an object, bending as it passes through regions smaller or equal to the subject’s wavelength. I examined this process with a pair of diffraction glasses serving as an “obstacle” and aligned my camera behind the glasses lens to photograph this phenomenon.

Diffraction glasses have lenses with diffraction grating comprised of countless parallel slits so minuscule and close together they appear invisible to the human eye. When a firework explodes, incandescent light is produced due to heat from combustion. As light from the firework travels through the grating slits, the light bends at various angles based on its wavelength and disperses into colorful patterns. Within the visible light spectrum, greater wavelengths such as red light diffract at greater angles and sharpness than that of violet light with a smaller wavelength. This is because longer wavelengths interact more frequently with the obstacle since they are closer in magnitude and have decreased traveling space. Since this firework emitted a reddish light from metals in the explosive, the resulting angles were greater and sharper, producing a mesmerizing array of color and diffraction patterns which exemplify the beauty of physics.