![]() ![]() With a straight or smoothly bending fiber, the light will hit the wall at an angle higher than the critical angle and will all be reflected back into the fiber. The light travels along the optical fiber, reflecting off the walls of the fiber. A fiber optic cable is usually made up of many of these strands, each carrying a signal made up of pulses of laser light. An optical fiber is a flexible strand of glass. Optical fibers are based entirely on this principle of total internal reflection. In that case all the light is totally reflected off the interface, obeying the law of reflection. This gives:įor any angle of incidence larger than the critical angle, Snell's law will not be able to be solved for the angle of refraction, because it will show that the refracted angle has a sine larger than 1, which is not possible. The critical angle can be found from Snell's law, putting in an angle of 90° for the angle of the refracted ray. Instead, all of it will be reflected back into the first medium, a process known as total internal reflection. ![]() ![]() If the light hits the interface at any angle larger than this critical angle, it will not pass through to the second medium at all. This has an interesting implication: at some angle, known as the critical angle, light travelling from a medium with higher n to a medium with lower n will be refracted at 90° in other words, refracted along the interface. Conversely, light traveling across an interface from higher n to lower n will bend away from the normal. When light crosses an interface into a medium with a higher index of refraction, the light bends towards the normal. ![]()
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