Aberration associated with the reflection of light on a moving mirror.pdf

1 Aberration associated with the reflection of light on a moving mirror Bernhard Rothenstein and Ioan Damian Politehnnica University of Timisoara, Department of Physics, Timisoara, Romania bernhard_rothenstein@, ijdamian@ Abstract. Imposing start from the beginning that the incidence and the reflection of a ray t on an arbitrarily orientated mirror take place at the same point in space and at the same zero time in all involved reference frames in relative motion, we decompose the reflection in two aberration of light effects, of the incident and of the reflected rays respectively. 1. Introduction The reflection of a plane-polarized wave on a moving mirror is associated with the aberration of light effect. 1,2,3,4,5,6 . It is known that the formulas that account for aberration can be derived from the constant light speed postulate, without using the Lorentz-Einstein transformations 6 . Most of the papers covering this topics deal with the case of a vertical mirror the plane of which is normal to the direction in which it moves. The purpose of our paper is to consider the general case of an arbitrary orientated mirror. Figure 1 shows a plane-polarized light wave incident on a plane mirror. The mirror is at rest in the K’(X’O’Y’) inertial reference frame. One of the incidence points coincides with the origin O’ and takes place at a time t’=0, generating the event )0,0,0( === tyxO that is characterized by the same space-time coordinates in all inertial reference frames in relative uniform motion. In the rest frame of the mirror, the angles of incidence and reflection are equal to each other and equal to ! . The problem is to find a relationship between the angle of incidence i and the angle of reflection r both measured in the K(XOY) reference frame, relative to which K’ moves with constant velocity V in the positive direction of the common OX(O’X’) axes. The axes of the two reference frames are parallel to each other