Snell’s Law

Introduction
According to Snell’s Law [1] when light is incident on an interface separating two
media, as depicted in Figure 1, the angles of incidence and refraction, θ1 and θ2 , are
related,
n1 sin(θ1 ) = n2 sin(θ2 ) , (1)
where θ1 or θ2 is the angle between the normal to the interface and the direction in
which the incident or refracted wave is propagating. The quantities n1 and n2 are the
indices of refraction of the two media.
The purpose of this experiment is to determine experimentally the index of refrac-
tion, relative to air, of a cubical block of plastic. The experiment involves measuring
angles of incidence and refraction and then using Eq. 1 to calculate the index of refrac-
tion.

Medium 1

θ1

Medium 2 θ2

Figure 1: A geometrical depiction of Snell’s Law.

1
 Figure 2: Experimental arrangement.

Procedure
Place the worksheet (Figure 4) on the piece of cardboard. Insert five common pins
into the circles denoted 0 through 4 on the worksheet.1 Now place the plastic cube on
the square outlined on the worksheet. The setup should appear as in Figure 2. Look
through the face of the cube where pin 1 is positioned. You should be able to view
pin 0, which is located on the opposite face of the cube. Now, sighting along the line
connecting pin 1 to pin 0, place a third pin directly behind pin 0 so that it is directly
hidden from view. Move this pin approximately three inches away from pin 0 in such
a manner that it remains hidden by pin 0. Insert this pin into the cardboard, and label
it pin 1′ . The three pins should appear to lie on a straight line (See Fig 3.). Apply the
same procedure using pin 2 and pin 3, labelling the newly inserted pins as 2′ and 3′ .
Remove the cube from the worksheet. On the worksheet draw three straight lines, one
connecting pin 0 to pin 1′ , one connecting pin 0 to pin 2′ , and one connecting pin 0 to
pin 3′ . Each pair of lines pin i (i = 1, 2, 3) – pin 0 and pin 0 – pin i′ should resemble
the pair of lines corresponding to the incident and refracted waves in Figure 1.

1. For each pair of connecting lines obtain the angle of incidence θ1 and angle of
refraction θ2 .

2. For each pair of angles, calculate the relative index of refraction n of the plastic:
sin(θ1 )
n = nn21 = sin(θ 2)
.

3. Compute the average and standard error of the three values of the relative in-
dex of refraction, as discussed in the Appendix. In Table 1 Report the index of
refraction in accord with Eq. 5.
1 The purpose of pin 4 is to prevent the cube from moving while data are being collected.

2
 Figure 3: The experiment in progress.

4. In Table 2 report the 95% confidence interval for the index of refraction, in ac-
cord with Eq’s 6, 7, and 8.

Appendix
Given a set of data xi (i = 1 . . . N ) corresponding to a quantity whose true value is
xt . If each of the xi differs from xt because each xi includes a random error ǫi , i.e.
xi = xt + ǫi , then an unbiased estimate of xt is x̄,
N
1 X
x̄ = xi , (2)
N i=1

and an unbiased estimate of its standard error is σ,

σN −1
σ= √ , (3)
N
where s
PN
i=1 (xi− x̄)2
σN −1 = . (4)
N −1
In calculating σN −1 , the number of degress of freedom ν = N − 1 is used rather than
N . Note: In Microsoft Excel x̄ and σN −1 can be calculated using the library functions
AVERAGE and STDEV.
To reflect the statistical uncertainty in xt , the experimental results are typically
reported as
Qest ± δQ , (5)

3
where Qest = x̄ is the unbiased estimate of xt and δQ = σ is the standard deviation of
x̄. Equation 5 can be understood informally to mean that, assuming the experimental
results are consistent with theory, then the value of Qest , predicted by theory, is likely
to lie within the limits defined by Equation 5. This informal interpretation can be made
more precise. Specifically, one specifies a confidence interval, e.g. the 95% confidence
interval (See below.). Then assuming that the theory accounts for the experimental
results, there is a 95% probability that the calculated confidence interval from some
future experiment encompasses the theoretical value. If, for a given experiment the
value of xt predicted by theory lies outside of the confidence interval, the assumption
that theory accounts for the results of the experiment is rejected, i.e. the experimental
results are inconsistent with theory. The confidence interval is expressed as

[Qest − X δQ, Yest + X δQ] , (6)

The quantity X is obtained from a Student’s t-distribution and depends on the confi-
dence interval and the degrees of freedom. A detailed and illuminating discussion of
the Student’s t-distribution can be found in the Wikipedia on-line free encyclopedia. [2]
There are various ways of obtaining or calculating the value of X. For example, the
spreadsheet Microsoft Excel includes a library function T.INV.2T for calculating X
based on a two-tailed t-test. Specifically,

X = T.INV.2T(p, ν) , (7)

where the probability p = 1 − (the confidence

100
interval)
and ν is the degrees of freedom.
Consider the following example for illustrative purposes. The number of data points is
4; the confidence interval is 95%. Therefore
95
X = T.INV.2T(1 − , 3 − 1) = 4.303 . (8)
100

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References
[1] Wikipedia. Snell’s law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snell’s_law,
2008. [Online; accessed 12-March-2008].

[2] Wikipedia. Student’s t-distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distributi

2017. [Online; accessed 22-March-2017].

5
 4 0
b b

15◦
1 2 3
b b b

25◦
35◦

Figure 4: Worksheet.

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 θ1 θ2 n
15◦
25◦
35◦

n̄ ± σ

Table 1: Data and Calculations

n̄ − Xσ n̄ + Xσ

Table 2: The 95% Confidence Interval