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You find an unlabeled box of fine needles, and want to determine how thick they

ID: 2288017 • Letter: Y

Question

You find an unlabeled box of fine needles, and want to determine how thick they are. A standard ruler won't do the job, since all you can tell is that each needle is less than a millimeter thick. So to find the thickness, you use the needle to poke a hole in a piece of brown construction paper. Then you arrange your 670 nm laser pointer to shine through the hole, and a circular diffraction pattern, consisting of a central bright circle surrounded by alternating dark and bright rings, appears on the wall 22.2 m away. Now you can use your ruler to measure that the central bright circle is 13.2 cm in diameter. What is the diameter of the needle?

I followed the previous steps as similar example posted on chegg however the answer turned out to be wrong in my similar problem. I could not identify what I did wrong.

The incorrect answers I inputed were as follows:112.68, 225, 1.12, 137.

I would greatly appriciate your help!

Explanation / Answer

Rayleigh's criteria for resolution for a circular aperature is
theta = 1.22 y / D     where y is the wavelength and D diameter of aperature
theta = 1.22 * 6.7 * 10E-7 / .132 = 6.19 * 10E-6
Now assume that the image was formed (from 2 aperatures) with the center
of 1 image falling on the edge of the other image (just resolved)
Then d (diameter) = S * theta = 22.2 * 6.19 * 10E-6 = 1.37 * 10E-4 m
or 137 um

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