Minimum deviation

Have you ever played with a prism and noticed how light bends when it passes through it? Well, when we talk about minimum deviation, we are talking about how that bending can be minimized or reduced.

Let me explain. A prism is a 3-sided glass or plastic object that can split white light into all the colors of the rainbow! When white light enters a prism, it bends, and this bending is called refraction. This bending depends on the wavelength of the light, meaning different colors bend differently.

Now here’s where the idea of minimum deviation comes in. When the prism bends the light, it separates the colors with different angles, but if we change the angle of the prism, the colors will change their direction of bending. If we find an angle at which a ray of light enters the prism and is refracted so that it neither deviates right nor left, then that is called the angle of minimum deviation.

In simpler words, the minimum deviation is when the prism bends the different colors of light in a way that they all come out in a straight line without any deviation. It's like creating the perfect path that doesn't change the color of the light and doesn't create a rainbow!

Scientists use the angle of minimum deviation to study the properties of light and how it interacts with different materials. Cool, huh?