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Unpolarized light, after being reflected by a specular (shiny) surface, generally obtains a degree of polarization. This phenomenon was observed in the early 1800s by the mathematician Étienne-Louis Malus , after whom Malus's law is named.
The Stokes I, Q, U and V parameters. The Stokes parameters are a set of values that describe the polarization state of electromagnetic radiation.They were defined by George Gabriel Stokes in 1851, [1] [2] as a mathematically convenient alternative to the more common description of incoherent or partially polarized radiation in terms of its total intensity (I), (fractional) degree of ...
where I 0 is the initial intensity and θ i is the angle between the light's initial polarization direction and the axis of the polarizer. A beam of unpolarized light can be thought of as containing a uniform mixture of linear polarizations at all possible angles.
The polarization is characterized at each wavelength by its degree of polarization, and orientation (the e-vector angle, or scattering angle). The polarization pattern of the sky is dependent on the celestial position of the Sun. While all scattered light is polarized to some extent, light is highly polarized at a scattering angle of 90° from ...
Circular polarization is often encountered in the field of optics and, in this section, the electromagnetic wave will be simply referred to as light. The nature of circular polarization and its relationship to other polarizations is often understood by thinking of the electric field as being divided into two components that are perpendicular to ...
The Jones vector describes the polarization of light in free space or another homogeneous isotropic non-attenuating medium, where the light can be properly described as transverse waves. Suppose that a monochromatic plane wave of light is travelling in the positive z -direction, with angular frequency ω and wave vector k = (0,0, k ), where the ...
An illustration of the polarization of light that is incident on an interface at Brewster's angle. Brewster's angle (also known as the polarization angle) is an angle of incidence at which light with a particular polarization is perfectly transmitted through a transparent dielectric surface, with no reflection.
In this case, the Pockels cell is acting as a quarter wave plate, where linearly-polarized light is converted to circularly-polarized light. With the addition of a Brewster window (left), this change in polarization can be converted to a change in the intensity of the beam, by transmitting only the p-polarized vector component.