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Diagram showing displacement of the Sun's image at sunrise and sunset Comparison of inferior and superior mirages due to differing air refractive indices, n. Atmospheric refraction is the deviation of light or other electromagnetic wave from a straight line as it passes through the atmosphere due to the variation in air density as a function of height. [1]
Light waves change phase by 180° when they reflect from the surface of a medium with higher refractive index than that of the medium in which they are travelling. [1] A light wave travelling in air that is reflected by a glass barrier will undergo a 180° phase change, while light travelling in glass will not undergo a phase change if it is reflected by a boundary with air.
Similarly, seeing non-luminous objects requires light hitting the object to cause it to reflect that light. While the effects of observation are often negligible, the object still experiences a change (leading to the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment). This effect can be found in many domains of physics, but can usually be reduced to ...
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. In optics , the Pockels effect , or Pockels electro-optic effect , is a directionally-dependent linear variation in the refractive index of an optical medium ...
The outflow of air mass from the cell creates harmonic waves in the atmosphere known as Rossby waves. These ultra-long waves determine the path of the polar jet stream, which travels within the transitional zone between the tropopause and the Ferrel cell. By acting as a heat sink, the polar cell moves the abundant heat from the equator toward ...
In the absence of melanin, the layer is translucent (i.e. the light passing through is randomly and diffusely scattered by the particles) and a noticeable portion of the light that enters this translucent layer re-emerges via a radial scattered path. That is, there is backscatter, the redirection of the light waves back out to the open air.
The experiment compared the speed of light in perpendicular directions in an attempt to detect the relative motion of matter, including their laboratory, through the luminiferous aether, or "aether wind" as it was sometimes called. The result was negative, in that Michelson and Morley found no significant difference between the speed of light ...
The Kerr effect, also called the quadratic electro-optic (QEO) effect, is a change in the refractive index of a material in response to an applied electric field.The Kerr effect is distinct from the Pockels effect in that the induced index change for the Kerr effect is directly proportional to the square of the electric field instead of varying linearly with it.