What Is Dispersion In Physics?

While light consists of seven colours – violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. These colours are called the spectrum of the white light. Violet has the minimum wavelength (or maximum frequency) and red the maximum wavelength (or minimum frequency). In a vacuum, all these colours travel with the same speed but in a transparent medium they have different speeds. Violet travels the slowest through glass while red travels the fastest. Due to different speeds, the colours are refracted through different angles and, therefore, when a narrow beam of white light passes through a glass prism, it is split up into its constituent colours. This separation of light into colours is called dispersion.

The most spectacular illustration of dispersion is the rainbow. When the sun shines soon after a shower of rain, a rainbow is seen in the opposite the sun. The beautiful colours of the rainbow are due to the dispersion of sunlight by water droplets suspended in the air after rain. The droplets act like prisms. In each droplet there is dispersion as well as total internal reflection. A similar effect is produced by droplets of water from a fountain in sunlight.

The dependence of wave speed and refractive index on the wavelength is called Disperssion.

A short end and basic answer would be......

Dispersion starts at white light and when it hits the prism it splits up into 7 different colours (roygbiv)

Dispersion is the dependence of the index of refraction on the wavelength of the incident light, it is responsible for the formation of rainbows when sunlight is refracted by water drops in the atmosphere, and it is responsible for the spectrum of light output from white light sent through a prism.