As light enters a more dense medium, it will bend because of the speed reduction in that medium. A bit like if your right wheel enters the gravel next to the road, the car wants to go there.

Now here comes the magic:
1) My sugar solution is a beautiful gradient: more dense towards the bottom, more watery towards the surface. This causes the light to bend in a nice curve, finally hitting the bottom.
2) I managed to find a balance where I have a nice density gradient and none or little sugar on the bottom. So now the bottom becomes a mirror because of the water and acrylic boundary.
The light will now reflect from the bottom, starting a new curve.
This will go on for the entire length of the container, or until I run out of light (it spreads, disperses, along the way). You can see I barely got started on the second jump.

Oh and the really cool thing: occasionally radio signals do the same, if the atmospheric conditions are just right 🙂

#stem #laserfun #engineer #testandmeasurement #physics

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@oz1lqo

So this is something like half of a 1d waveguide?

Can one cause the extremum of the refraction index to be somewhere in the middle of a column of liquid (perhaps by having two different dissolved substances?)?

@robryk it’s more like what we know as a evaporation duct in the radio world. As the sugar density (or atmosphere moisture) increases, the light (or radio signal) bends. In case of the radio signal, since the earth is round, the signal ends up curving along with the it, extending the range.

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