Polychromatic light

Under polychromatic light (from the Greek: poly "a lot", "multiple"; chromos, "colored", so "many-colored") refers to light that different from a blend color is. Another word for polychromatic would be spectral broadband.

If light is assumed to be a wave phenomenon , polychromatic light is a mixture of many wavelengths . If light is regarded as a particle (photon), polychromatic light consists of photons that have different energies .

In contrast to polychromatic light, monochromatic light has only one wavelength and the particles only have one energy.

Strictly speaking, the mixture of a few monochromatic spectral lines is already polychromatic. However, a more typical example of polychromatic light is white light (e.g. also daylight ) in which the distribution of the wavelengths is continuous.

When passing through a prism , polychromatic light is broken down into its monochromatic spectral colors .

literature

• Bahaa E. Saleh: Fundamentals of Photonics . Wiley-VCH, Weinheim 2008, ISBN 978-3-527-40677-7 , pp. 75f.