Timeline for Is it possible to have single-sided refraction?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| May 10, 2023 at 2:42 | history | edited | Qmechanic♦ | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 10, 2023 at 2:29 | comment | added | hyportnex | If by "this" you are referring to my comment then note that the circulator is based on the ferrite material being nonreciprocal when biased magnetically, for the optical regime see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_effect. The unusual behavior on the polarization of the wave is caused by the skew-symmetry of the permeability tensor. Just slapping two or more different refractive materials will not achieve that. You need something to break the symmetry (reciprocity) of the propagation. There are other materials beside ferrites that can be used in the optical regime. | |
| May 10, 2023 at 2:12 | history | edited | Zai1208 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| May 10, 2023 at 2:09 | comment | added | Zai1208 | Would this be possible with 2 refracting materials instead of 1? | |
| May 10, 2023 at 1:25 | comment | added | FlatterMann | @hyportnex I get your point. I would even say that we don't have to go to a circulator to get such a geometry going, but it's not really described by ray optics and Snell's law doesn't apply in that case. For a simple optical system as drawn in the OP, however, the main "problem" IMHO is that the way the entry into the material is drawn is simply not physical. There is a also a simple causality argument: how would the perpendicular ray "know" at which angle to exit? A ray optical system that "can do this" is a corner reflector, but it needs more than one reflection and it displaces the beam. | |
| May 10, 2023 at 1:17 | comment | added | hyportnex | @FlatterMann Yes it possible but not in glass but rather in a magnetically biased ferrite material; at below 100GHz the gadget that does this is called a circulator, there is a whole industry specialized in making those. | |
| May 10, 2023 at 1:13 | comment | added | FlatterMann | Snell's law rules out that this can happen. A ray entering at an angle other than perpendicular to the surface can never become perpendicular to the surface inside the material, unless you can find a mystery material that has infinite refractive index, I guess. | |
| May 10, 2023 at 1:09 | comment | added | naturallyInconsistent | Do you just mean that the light enters the glass from below, goes straight up, reflect off the mirror, and then go back straight down? Yes, that is just a stereotypical 1D problem and it happens, just that it is not going to contribute much in our 3D world. | |
| S May 10, 2023 at 1:01 | review | First questions | |||
| May 10, 2023 at 1:16 | |||||
| S May 10, 2023 at 1:01 | history | asked | Zai1208 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |