BRAINCAKEThe Diffraction Grating
A diffraction grating is a slide with a very large number of equally spaced, parallel slits (lines), often several hundred per millimetre. When monochromatic light passes through it, light from all the slits interferes to produce a few very sharp, bright maxima at particular angles, with darkness in between.
The maxima occur where light from adjacent slits has a path difference of a whole number of wavelengths:
nλ = d sin θ
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