New answers tagged polarization
1
A polarizer 2D makes waves travel easily in the way of polarization, but absorbs the waves going perpendicular to the direction of polarization (turning them to heat).
This picture off wikipedia demonstrates this nicely:
When it comes to long waves like micro-waves you can use a metal plate with a few centimetres of septation, but with short waves like ...
1
Photographic polarizers are typically made from hardened gels with very long molecules. These molecules allow electrons to travel easily in one direction (generally along the molecules), but only with great difficulty in another. So when the oscillating electric field of light comes along, there will be two components. One, which points along the ...
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What you've described seems to be one example. In general, interactions between two quantum systems will put the system into some joint state which will generically be entangled. For example, if you have two spins coupled with a spin-spin coupling, then the ground state of that (total) two spin system has some entanglement.
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The spin of a right handed photon points in the direction of its momentum, while in a left handed photon it points in opposite way.
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I want to refer you to Weinberg QFT1, if you have not read it yet. Below is my attempt to answer your question in the formalism addressed there.
You are classifying particles by representations of the Poincaré group. A one particle state has to be transformed under an element of this group. Part of this transformation just changes the momentum, the other ...
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Reflection polarizes light. A reflected ray becomes linearly polarized perpendicular to the plane containing the incident and reflected rays. This is why polarized sunglasses are effective for reducing glare. The autofocus may not be working as expected because much of the scene is polarized light.
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@1. As for the $m \rightarrow 0$ limit. I don't think that will give you a massless particle. For any positive $m \gt 0$, however small, it is fundamentally different from a massless particle -- since you can boost into its rest frame, and the number of states will be the same as for any massive particle. In the calculus notion of a limit, there is no ...
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No, you won't see interference. The cw and ccw states are orthogonal.
You can prove that intuitively in the following way.
You could think of the incoming light to be cw polarized, then one waveplate would turn it vertical, the other one horizontal.
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That happens because electromagnetic waves are consist of electric and magnetic parts
http://www.edinformatics.com/math_science/e_mag_nasa_image.gif
which are running in orthogonal planes. And usually they run in all directions. When You polarize light - You let waves go just in one plane.
But air waves are just vibration of the same matter. You can not ...
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It sounds like your teacher's explanation might have been a little misleading. The reason sound can't be polarised is that it is a longitudinal wave, unlike light which is a transverse wave. (Those links have some animated diagrams that should help to make the difference clear.)
"Transverse" means that if a beam of light is coming towards you, the ...
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I am not sure exactly what your teacher meant, but to me the simple explanation is simply that sound is a pressure wave. Pressure has no direction, only a single value (scalar) and sound waves are fast periodic modulations of the pressure.
A wave on a string can have polarization because the string can be distorted in more than one "direction". It can have ...
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