# Tag Info

## New answers tagged polarization

1

To calculate the transmitted and scattered wave state at any angle from a plane interface, you need to resolve the incident field into s- and p-linear polarised wave amplitudes and multiply the two complex amplitudes by the amplitude Fresnel transmission and reflexion co-efficients. By "amplitude Fresnel co-efficient I mean the ratio of complex wave ...

2

I heard a few times that using them as sunglasses is hurting the eye since UV light is not filtered, but the pupil is wider than it would be w/o wearing them because the visible light is dimmed. IFAIK, there is no evidence for this claim. See this paper (unfortunately, it's behind a paywall): The supposition that, because of pupil dilation, there ...

1

The main idea behind polaroid sunglasses is that reflexion from water, snow and other glary reflectors is mainly polarized in one direction. To understand this, witness the behaviour foretold by the Fresnel Equations (the graph below taken from the Wikipedia "Fresnel Equations" page): so that you can see for a wide range of scattering angles from these ...

6

There is some evidence of polarization perception. Many people are able to perceive polarization of light. It may be seen as a yellowish horizontal bar or bow-tie shape (with "fuzzy" ends, hence the name "brush") visible in the center of the visual field against the blue sky viewed while facing away from the sun, or on any bright ...

1

Our eyes cannot see any difference between ordinary (i.e., unpolarized) and polarized light. You can check it yourself, if you look through a polarizer (for example, some sunglasses have one). All you can notice is that the world gets slightly darker (because you block roughly half the incoming light). In addition, some reflections might be reduced ...

0

Here is some possibly useful information from Goodman's "Statistical Optics." (Sorry about the lack of symbol quality -- so much for cut/paste from a PDF) Light from a thermal source is regarded as unpolarized if two conditions are met. First, we require that the intensity of the light passed by a polarization analyzer, situated in a plane perpendicular ...

2

It is indeed a topic that is discussed in many books but only a few give a rigorous mathematical description of the phenomena. For stringency in non-linear optics topics I always trust HARTMANN ROMER: Theoretical Optics, An Introduction. 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. A book which is also mathematically rigorous is BOYD, ROBERT W: ...

1

Consider parallel plate capacitor with dielectric in between the plates. Let $\mathbf E_0$ be the field in a dielectric due to charge on the parallel capacitor plates, and $\mathbf E_d$ the field due to the dielectric (in fact, due to the polarization charge on its faces). In this case, it can be shown that the depolarization field is given by the formula ...

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