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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 ...
Structure of KTP crystal, viewed down b axis, used in second harmonic generation.. Nonlinear optics (NLO) is the branch of optics that describes the behaviour of light in nonlinear media, that is, media in which the polarization density P responds non-linearly to the electric field E of the light.
The electromagnetic theory of light further emphasized the electric vibrations because of their interactions with matter, [5] whereas the old "plane of polarization" contained the magnetic vectors. Hence the electromagnetic theory would have reinforced the convention that the vibrations were normal to the plane of polarization — provided, of ...
In optics, polarized light can be described using the Jones calculus, [1] invented by R. C. Jones in 1941. Polarized light is represented by a Jones vector, and linear optical elements are represented by Jones matrices. When light crosses an optical element the resulting polarization of the emerging light is found by taking the product of the ...
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 ...
An ideal depolarizer would output randomly polarized light whatever its input, but all practical depolarizers produce pseudo-random output polarization. Optical systems are often sensitive to the polarization of light reaching them (for example grating-based spectrometers). Unwanted polarization of the input to such a system may cause errors in ...
Polarizers which maintain the same axes of polarization with varying angles of incidence [clarification needed] are often called [citation needed] Cartesian polarizers, since the polarization vectors can be described with simple Cartesian coordinates (for example, horizontal vs. vertical) independent from the orientation of the polarizer surface.
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 ...