light
Introduction
lightis often extended to adjacent wavelength ranges that the eye cannot detect—to infrared radiation, which has a frequency less than that of visible light, and to ultraviolet radiation and black light, which have a frequency greater than that of visible light.
If white light, which contains all visible wavelengths, is separated, or dispersed, into a spectrum, each wavelength is seen to correspond to a different color. Light that is all of the same wavelength and phase (all the waves are in step with one another) is called coherent
; one of the most important modern applications of light has been the development of a source of coherent light—the laser.
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