L ig ht wa t er

Follow these instructions to try two activities that will introduce you to the principles behind fibre optics.

8 June 2006 | Updated 14 October 2011

What you need What to do What's happening Applications Working with real fibre optics is quite difficult as it requires fairly high tech equipment (including LASER light sources). However, here is an activity you can do at home that demonstrates the properties of optical fibres.

What you need

For this activity, you will need:

a small soft-drink bottle with its label removed (one with straight sides works best) a torch milk correction fluid (such as liquid paper) or paint a very dark room (try to do the experiment when it is dark outside) sink, bucket or jar a thumbtack or safety pin sticky tape scissors paper. For this activity, we will need to make a thin, straight beam of light. Most torches produce a fairly wide beam, so you may need to use the paper to cover most of the end so only a thin beam of light comes out. Try for a beam with a width of one centimetre or less.

What to do
There are two parts to this activity. The first part shows how light bounces underwater.

The light beam is reflected back into the water.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Fill your bottle partway with water. Add a drop of milk, to make it easier to see the path of the light through the water. Place the bottle near the edge of a table in your dark room. Hold the torch down fairly low and shine it up through the side of the bottle onto the bottom of the water's surface. You should find the light travels up through the water, through the surface and into the air.

5.

Keep the beam of light aimed at the same point on the surface, but slowly lift the torch up so the angle between the light and the water becomes smaller and smaller.

6.

When the angle between the water and the beam of light becomes small enough, the light will not go through the surface any more but will bounce off it, like it was a mirror. The next part shows how to trap light in a stream of water.

1.

With the thumbtack, make a small hole in the bottle, a couple of centimetres from the bottom. You might find this easier if the bottle is filled with water so the sides don't bend when you push on them.

2.

Empty the bottle, dry off the outside and paint around the hole with correction fluid or paint. Paint at least one centimetre in each direction, and a couple of centimetres downwards. This ensures that the beam of light only travels down the stream of water.

3.

Fill the bottle with water until the water squirts out the hole in a steady stream. Make sure you have a sink or bucket set up to catch the water.

4. 5.

Shine your torch at the hole from the other side of the bottle. As the water comes out of the bottle, it will look clear until it starts to break up into drops. At that point, you may see some light glittering on the drops. Hold your finger in the water stream above the point where it breaks up. You should see a spot of light on your finger.

6.

If you look closely, you should find that the point of light is actually below the level of the hole. The light has stayed inside the stream of water as it bent down.

What's happening
Both of these activities rely on an effect called total internal reflection.

The beam of light stays inside the stream of water.

When light hits a boundary between two substances, like the surface of water, it often bends. This is called refraction. In the case of water and air, light bends towards the surface of the water when it goes from water into air. As the angle on the water side becomes smaller, the angle on the air side gets smaller even faster. When the angle on the water side is just right, the angle on the air side would have to be zero, so the light would be trying to go along the surface. If the angle on the water side is any smaller, then instead of going through into the air, the light bounces off the surface of the water. This is called total internal reflection. For the surface between water and air, the critical angle is 48.5 degrees. In this activity, the light stayed inside the stream of water because of total internal reflection. To start with, the light and the water both come out of the hole horizontally. As the water curves down, the light eventually hits the surface. Since the angle between the surface and the light is very slight, the light bounces off. As the water keeps bending, the light inside it keeps bouncing off the surface, until the water starts to break up. The same effect happens inside other clear materials such as long thin strands of glass or plastic, even if the strand curves or goes around in circles. This is called an optic fibre.

Applications
Doctors can look inside a person's body using a bundle of optic fibres connected to a television camera outside the body. This has lead to 'keyhole surgery', where doctors carry out complicated operations through small holes in the skin, instead of having to make large incisions. Optic fibres are also used to carry information, like telephone calls. By sending the information as carefully controlled pulses of different coloured light, it is possible for a single fibre less than a millimetre wide to carry thousands of phone calls. Optic fibres are becoming more important as scientists and engineers are developing technology called photonics, which is the study of ways to generate and harness light and other forms of radiant energy.