The Stack Overflow podcast is back! Listen to an interview with our new CEO.

# Tag Info

4

There are numerous ways to do this, with the best one depending on the operating wavelength, power handling requirement, switching speed requirement, etc. You can use a liquid crystal to rotate the beam polarization, and then a polarizing beam splitter to direct the beam depending on the state of the LC. You can use a an electro-optic modulator in one arm ...

3

They have taken the angle to be 90° because what is stated in the question: The light is incident normally on a diffraction grating. Third-order maxima are produced for each of the two wavelengths. No higher orders are produced for either wavelength. The normal to any surface is always 90°. But as pointed out by Holzner in comments (and waking me up ;-) )...

2

Combined with a polarizing beamsplitter, anything that can alter the polarization of a light beam produces a switchable beamsplitter. Whether that would work for your purpose depends on the experiment you're setting up. Liquid crystal displays work by altering the polarization of transmitted or reflected light, and have a switching speed on the order of 1 ...

2

Well the conventional lasers rely on electronic transitions for amplification of light. The Raman lasers on the other hand make use of Raman scattering for light amplification. Raman lasers are optically pumped systems. This pumping does not produce an inversion of our photon group as in electronically stimulated lasers. Also, take a look at Stokes photons. ...

1

But suppose we sample a spectrum of emission from all possible spectra. What can the eye infer from the three degrees of activation? The eye is limited to a three-way signal, where each type of receptor outputs the integral of the spectral power distribution of the stimulus $P(\lambda)$ weighted by the spectral sensitivity of the receptor, i.e. a signal of ...

1

The lens through which you look at the viewfinder screen basically is the same thing as a magnifying glass. I did a search for pages that explain how a magnifying glass works, and I was surprised by how little information on that subject is out there. The best I could find was this: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-convex-lenses-called-magnifying-glass The ...

1

Would a very long diffraction grating produce a diffraction pattern? Yes. You might need to set the screen further back to ensure that the far-field condition is still satisfied, but given that the screen is sufficiently far away (for the length of the grating), arbitrarily large gratings can be used. (Alternatively, you can drop the idealized introductory-...

1

The laser projects onto the plaque which causes a reflection onto the roof. On the vertical plane, the laser projects directly into a slit which causes diffraction of the light. This is why the second picture looks like a "stick" of light. But on the horizontal plane, think backwards. The projection onto the roof comes from the laser hitting it at an ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible