Michelson interferometer
Interferómetro de Michelson
- Date
- 1881 · confidence high
- Place
- Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
- Credited to
- Albert A. Michelson
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
A device that splits a light beam into two that travel different paths and recombine, so that interference fringes indicate length differences of a fraction of a wavelength. It measures lengths and speeds with unprecedented precision.
Michelson built the first apparatus in Helmholtz's laboratory in Berlin and repeated it at Potsdam (1881), where city vibrations had prevented him from working. He received the Nobel Prize (1907) for his precision optical instruments.
What it led to
- the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887)
- measurement of the metre in wavelengths
- Fourier transform spectroscopy and gravitational-wave detectors