Color and Spectra

Even though the experiment consisted of fairly simple materials, it produced interesting results.It was set up using a two meter stick a lamp and a one meter stick. The meter sticks were placed at 90 degree angles. They were stood up and used grating holders and the spectrum was measured. The glass or plastic slit that diffracts light used two slits of grating and it was placed at the end of the two meter stick.

Two triangles can be created using the wavelength, length of the distance of the diffractive glass to the light bulb and the distance calculated for each given color. When the eye moves outward from the center, light reaching it at a point along that color that was needed to be found gives the length d. For two similar triangles the ratio of equivalent sides of the two triangles are equal to one another.

As we measured each wavelength the purple was 393 nanometers, blue 446 nm, green 506 nm, yellow 507 nm, and red was 644 nm. There is a lot of uncertainty with these numbers because it is quite difficult to determine the exact location of the color spectra. This lab definitely requires at least two people to completely get done otherwise one cannot determine the location of distance from the light source to the designated color.



In the five thousand volt terminals of the power supply, the gas that was measured was mercury as the hidden gas. The lengths from the distance of the color from the light source was purple at 48 cm, green at 61 cm, yellow at 65 cm, red at 78 cm. Again these came to around values of 446, 515, 556, 588 nanometers which is in a fairly linear scale like it should be. There is a lot of uncertainty however because again human error makes a fairly large difference in the wavelength of the given color.