Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In general, the polarization of monochromatic light is completely described via four Stokes parameters, which form a (non-orthonormal) vector space when the various waves are incoherent. For light propagating in the z direction, with electric field: In cosmology, no circular polarization is expected, so V is not considered.
Kerr rotation and Kerr ellipticity are changes in the polarization of incident light which comes in contact with a gyromagnetic material. Kerr rotation is a rotation in the plane of polarization of transmitted light, and Kerr ellipticity is the ratio of the major to minor axis of the ellipse traced out by elliptically polarized light on the plane through which it propagates.
The fact that light could be polarized was for the first time qualitatively explained by Newton using the particle theory. Étienne-Louis Malus in 1810 created a mathematical particle theory of polarization. Jean-Baptiste Biot in 1812 showed that this theory explained all known phenomena of light polarization. At that time polarization was ...
Polarization is an example of a qubit degree of freedom, which forms a fundamental basis for an understanding of more complicated quantum phenomena. Much of the mathematical machinery of quantum mechanics, such as state vectors , probability amplitudes , unitary operators , and Hermitian operators , emerge naturally from the classical Maxwell's ...
In physics, physical optics, or wave optics, is the branch of optics that studies interference, diffraction, polarization, and other phenomena for which the ray approximation of geometric optics is not valid. This usage tends not to include effects such as quantum noise in optical communication, which is studied in the sub-branch of coherence ...
Michael Faraday holding a piece of glass of the type he used to demonstrate the effect of magnetism on polarization of light, c. 1857.. By 1845, it was known through the work of Augustin-Jean Fresnel, Étienne-Louis Malus, and others that different materials are able to modify the direction of polarization of light when appropriately oriented, [4] making polarized light a very powerful tool to ...
As shown by Albert Einstein, [10] [53] some form of energy quantization must be assumed to account for the thermal equilibrium observed between matter and electromagnetic radiation; for this explanation of the photoelectric effect, Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. [54] Since the Maxwell theory of light allows for all possible ...
Initially, the laser light induces coherent polarization in the sample, i.e., the transitions between electron and hole states oscillate with the laser frequency and a fixed phase. The polarization dephases typically on a sub-100 fs time-scale in case of nonresonant excitation due to ultra-fast Coulomb- and phonon-scattering. [15]