Rainbows

In this exercise, we'll examine how rainbows work. First, we're going to make a rainbow. Your TA will help you work together as a class. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Find the hose and stand out on the grass. Turn the hose on and put a finger over the end so the water sprays in droplets. Shoot the water up in the air. Find the rainbow. Where do you have to stand to see the rainbow? Where is the sun when you see the rainbow? When you move around but leave the hose stationary, what happens? When you move the hose around, what happens? What factors would make the rainbow appear different? Amount of water? Time of day? Anything else? 10. Take a picture of your rainbow! Rainbows work by refraction, which we discussed in class today. Explain refraction, including Snell's law to your pet tiger. Taboo refraction, index of refraction, Snell's Law, sine and other trigonometry terms, and Fermat's principle. (Remember: tabooing a word means you should explain what's going on without using those words. Your tiger doesn't understand them.)

Here's a drawing of a prism. Sketch roughly the fastest possible route from A to B, remembering that light travels slower in the prism.

The prism slows down blue light more than it slows down red light. That means the blue and red light take slightly different paths from A to B. Which one goes higher? Which one bends more? Sketch in the paths of red and blue light below.

The prism separates blue light from red light, and the other colors lie in between.

This is the basic idea behind a rainbow. Because different colors of light have different speeds in water, they get refracted differently. A rainbow is a little more involved. Here's a picture illustrating how this makes a rainbow. In this exercise, we'll use Geogebra to understand this picture in more detail.

credit: Rebecca McDowell http://www.rebeccapaton.net/rainbows/formatn.htm A rainbow isn't made by prisms. It's made by droplets of water, and small droplets of water take the shape of a sphere. Open up Geogebra and make a circle. You can turn off axes and equation view and make your circle with the geometry tools.

This circle represents a typical raindrop. We're going to see what happens to a ray of light from the sun as it enters the raindrop. Let's draw a radius of the circle. This radius shows the direction of light coming in from the sun. Next, draw a ray that is parallel to the radius and ends on the edge of the circle. You should be able to drag this ray up and down. You'll need to make a parallel line first, then use the parallel line to make the ray. Since this ray is our light source, let's make it yellow.

When the ray of light enters the droplet, it refracts. Create a variable n to stand for the index of refraction, and initialize it to 1.33 (this is approximately right for red light). Snell's law discusses how light bends relative to the normal of the surface. Draw in the normal line to the surface at point D. There is no normal line construction tool, so you'll have to use the tangent tool and the perpendicular line tool.

Some light will be reflected at point D. What is the law for this reflected light? Find the path of the reflected light in your picture. The reflected light does not form a rainbow; it's the same for every color. The rainbow comes when we have refraction, so we'll next think about the refracted light that enters the drop. Should the ray bend in towards the normal (towards point A) or away from the normal (towards point B) as it enters the drop? Find the angle between your ray ED and the normal line. Based on this angle and Snell's Law, what is the angle that the ray makes with the normal inside the drop? Find this new angle and trace the path of the ray through the drop to the back surface. You will need to solve Snell's Law

for the angle inside the drop. Assume the index of refraction of air is 1.0. To enter your formula into Geogebra, you will need to use the arcsine function asin() and the sine function sin() with the angle with given size tool. Here's an example:

When the ray gets to the back of the drop, part of it goes through and refracts again. This part makes a rainbow! Unfortunately, this rainbow is too close to the sun for us to see; the light is not deflected very much. So instead, let's find the ray that reflects off the back of the raindrop. Use the rule for reflected light along with a tangent at point G to find the path of the light.

To complete your picture, have the light leave the water drop, refracting again. Does the light bend toward or away from the normal this time?

This is how light refracts, reflects, and refracts again when it enters a water droplet. To see the overall effect of the raindrop on the light, find the angle between rays ED and JK'.

By dragging point D around the edge of the drop, you can see how light bends differently when it hits the drop in different places. This simulates light from the sun. Many light rays come in parallel to each other from the sun. Then they refract and reflect in the drop and come out different directions. Turn on the trace tool for rays JK' and ED. By tracing over all possibilities for point D, we can get a picture of where all the light hitting the raindrop goes.

The light gets refracted to many different angles. What is the biggest possible angle between the incoming and outgoing light beams?

More of the light ends up near this biggest angle than any other, as we can see in the picture. If we change the index of refraction, we'll change the picture slightly. Change n to 1.345 and find the biggest angle again.

Trace out the path for blue light on top of the one you've already found for yellow light. You should get something like this:

The blue light works almost the same way as the yellow light, but not quite. The yellow light can be bent through a slightly bigger angle. When we look up in the sky, we see yellow at a slightly different angle than blue light. If we include red light (n=1.325), our picture looks pretty complicated:

The red light can bend through the biggest angle of all. What does all this mean for you, looking up at the rainbow? Take a look back at the original cartoon showing the sun, some raindrops, and a guy looking up in the sky. Now we know why light takes the path it does through the raindrop. Can you see that the bigger the angle light bends in the raindrop, the higher it appears in the sky? That means red appears highest up and blue is on bottom. There is still some red mixed in with the blue! But because the rays cluster up around the biggest possible angle, we still see predominantly one color at a time. That's how a rainbow works.

credit: Nasim Mansurov http://mansurovs.com/full-rainbow Now see if you can answer these questions about the rainbow we see above: Why is the inside of the rainbow brighter than the outside?

Why is the rainbow in a circle shape?

Where do you think the sun is in this photo? What angle above the horizon is the sun? (You can use a protractor to help.)

Why is there a double rainbow? If you have time left, see if you can show the double rainbow construction on your Geogebra file.

This image shows four rainbows at once? What's going on? What's the difference between these rainbows? Make a hypothesis about how this quadruple rainbow formed. (The photo is not a fake!) Finally, explain how a rainbow works to your pet tiger. Taboo refraction, reflection, Snell's Law, index of refraction.

If you have extra time, look up supernumerary rainbows. I've only seen such a rainbow once in my life!

Read about how they are formed, and explain supernumerary rainbows to your pet tiger.