Question

State the cause of dispersion of white light

Answer 1

When a beam of white light enters a prism, it gets refracted at the point and splits into its seven constituent colors, viz. violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The acronym for the seven constituent colors of white light is VIBGYOR. This splitting of the light rays occurs because of the different angles of bending for each color and this different angles of bending occur because the different component of light faces different refractive indices when passing through the glass prism.

When a narrow beam of sunlight is allowed to fall on one of the rectangular surfaces of the glass prism, we obtain a colored spectrum with red and violet color at its extreme.