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Huygens' principle

   Also found in: Encyclopedia 0.03 sec.
Huy·gens' principle  (hgnz)
n.
The principle that any point on a wave front of light may be regarded as the source of secondary waves and that the surface that is tangent to the secondary waves can be used to determine the future position of the wave front.
[After Christiaan Huygens.]
Huygens' principle
The principle that any point on a wave front may be regarded as a source of spherical or circular wavelets. The sum of all such wavelets emanating from the front is same as the wavefront itself. This principle can be used to derive the laws of reflection and refraction. See also superposition.


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? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
Copson, The Mathematical Theory of Huygens' Principle, Chelsea Publ.
Optical diffraction in close proximity to plane apertures. III. ... by Mielenz, Klaus D. / Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
This is a significant departure from the classical formulation of Huygens' principle, where a reverse flow of energy on the positive side of the aperture is precluded by the explicit assumption that light does not travel backwards.
Optical diffraction in close proximity to plane apertures, part 2, ... by Mielenz, Klaus D. / Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
The Kirchhoff and Rayleigh-Sommerfeld integral equations (1) and (2) are alternative forms of the theorem of Helmholtz (5), which expresses Huygens' principle in terms of a scalar wave function U and its normal derivatives without assuming specific attributes of this function, except that it is continuous and twice differentiable with continuous derivatives and obeys the homogeneous wave equation,
Optical diffraction in close proximity to plane apertures. I. ... by Mielenz, Klaus D. / Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
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