What would happen if light hit a non-differentiable curve

opticsreflection

Suppose we are talking about reflections in 2D, and let's suppose that hypothetically I have something like a weistrass function with one side completely reflective

enter image description here

How would light reflect of it's surface if we shot a beam from above to the curve (at any point)?

This may seem like a trivial question, but it gets complicated as soon as you realize since the function is not differentiable, there is no clear tangent line approximation we can talk about and hence no normal at a point. So, it's no longer clear how to apply snell's law of reflection.

Best Answer

Your question is phrased in the language of ray optics. But ray optics is just an approximation to the propagation of light as a wave. We can obtain the equations of ray optics by writing down a wave amplitude of the form $$ \phi(\vec{r},t) = A(\vec{r}) e^{i S(\vec{r}) - \omega t}, $$ and plugging it into the wave equation. If we make various assumptions, we can obtain the standard results of ray optics (light travels in straight lines, Snell's Laws of refraction & reflection, etc.) These assumptions basically all boil down to "the wavelength of light is small compared to any other length scale in the problem." Wikipedia has all the gory details if you're interested.

The Weierstrass function fails the assumptions required to use ray optics. The fractal nature of the surface means that the "roughness" of the surface is significant on all length scales, both greater than and less than the wavelength of the incident light. We therefore can't use Snell's Law and the other results of ray optics at all. To find out what would happen, we would have to solve the wave equation with the Weierstrass function as a boundary instead. This is left as an exercise to the reader.