In: Physics
You shine a laser on a plastic prism made from an unknown material and measure the angles relative to the normal that the light takes both inside and outside the medium. You make a plot of sin ?inside versus sin ?outside for the plastic object and calculate the slope of best-fit line of your plot to be 0.79365 ± 0.05669. What is the index of refraction of the plastic object?
Correct Answer: 1.26 +/- 0.09
How do you get the 0.09 uncertainty?
Using Snell's law,
n1 sino
= n2 sini
Where n1 is the refractive index of air, n1 = 1 and n2 is the
refractive index of the material
sini/sino
= 1/n2 = 0.079365
0.05669
n2 = 1/(0.079365
0.05669)
= 1/[0.079365 x (1
0.714295)]
= 1.26 x (1
0.714295)-1.
Expanding the second term in the bracket binomially,
n2 = 1.26 [1
0.714295
(0.714295)2
(0.714295)3 ...]
We can neglect all the higher powers
n2 = 1.26[(1
0.714295)]
= 1.26
0.09