; Refractive Index of Water | Michael Ian Lapsley

Refractive Index of Water

Posted on Tuesday, August 23, 2011, 9:37 AM

Due to the effects of optical dispersion, the refractive index of water is dependent on the wavelength of light being used. After a long search, I found a good reference for this information (Daimon and Masumura). here is a plot of their data in the visible range:


Matlab was used to fit a exponential decay function to the 20oC data:

y = a e-bx  + c
where:
a = 0.1140
b = 0.0048
c = 1.3264

Here is a plot of the fit with the data:

****NOTE** This fit is only valid from 400 nm to 800 nm and is not perfect ****
Here is a Calculator to solve this fit:

Equation Solver

This program solves ae-bx + c using java script imbedded in HTML. This is intended to solve the exponential function to determine the refractive index of water at different wavelengths.
Here are the inputs:
a:
b:  
c:  
x:  
(wavelength of light in nanometers)
Solution to ae-bx + c:
Output:  

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