Re: What is a diffraction order?

"Diffraction order" refers to diffraction gratings, and the angles of
the beams that are either reflected from or transmitted through them.

A diagram would illustrate the concept better than I could describe
with text alone. It might help for you to Google "diffraction grating"
and look for a figure that explains the concept.

At any rate, here is my text description of diffraction orders. Again,
a diagram is really required to understand it:

The (reflected or transmitted) beams from a grating have the following
property: the optical path difference for adjacent rulings on the
grating must be an integer multiple of the wavelength. This integer
gives the order for that particular beam.

So:
The zero-th order beam has an optical path difference of zero between
rulings,
The first order beam has an optical path difference equal to one
wavelength,
The second order beam has ... two wavelengths,
etc. etc.

Mark

.

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