Abstract
Lloyd's mirror interferometers are optical devices used in and relevant to many fields of research today, such as underwater acoustics, sonar research, and laser research. Our work sought to construct a Lloyd's mirror to justify the device's mechanisms and characterize it. We assembled our Lloyd's mirror by placing a transmitter at a distance d = 1.0287 m across from a receiver, with a metallic reflector placed perpendicular at a distance h to induce interference. To characterize our device, we derived a value for the wavelength of the signal emitted by the transmitter by varying h across a set of values 0.117 m to 0.320 m, where we subsequently measured the intensity I of the signal to be between 0.72 mA and 9.40 mA. This allowed us to analyze the interference to compute a value of λ = 0.031 ± 0.006 m for the wavelength.
