Plane and Spherical Mirrors

Introduction to plane and spherical mirrors:

Plane mirror are commonly used for looking glasses. A plane mirror is generally made of glass plate of few millimeters thickness .One surface of glass is polished to a high degree of smoothness forming the front surface of the mirror .The back surface is silvered that is then painted with silver or mercury or some opaque material. The front surface the silvering is protected because coating of opaque paint .When the light falls on this plate it falls on silver passing the opaque paint and gets reflected and we neglect the thickness of  plate and represent the mirror as single surface.

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Formation in Plane Mirror


Consider a point object O placed just in front of a plane mirror. Light rays falling from O fall on the plane mirror and gets reflected .The reflected rays reflect backwards to meet at a point I and the reflected rays fall on our eyes they pretend to come from I .Hence we see the image of O at I and image is formed in the plane mirror.

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Spherical Mirror


All mirrors we use in day to day life are not plane and there comes the picture of  spherical mirror. For example the rear view mirrors we often see in the vehicles have a curved surface such mirrors are spherical mirrors. A cut off portion from a  glass sphere or a portion has two dissimilar surfaces form the spherical mirror.The same side of surface as the centre of the original sphere is called the concave surface. The expanding surface  in the spherical mirror which expands out is called the convex surface. The spherical mirror has one polished  and  other smooth surface when we silver on other surface we get  two types of spherical mirrors. If  concave surface is silvered  and convex surface is made smooth we get a convex mirror. If  concave surface is smoothed and convex surface is silvered we get a concave mirror.When the light falls on the smooth surface of the spherical mirror it enters the glass and it gets reflected at the opaque silver surface The thickness of the glass is not of that concern and that represents the  single curved surface spherical mirror.