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Lecture

Polarization Effects: E-M Waves Interacting with Matter

In course

PHYS-201(d): General physics: electromagnetism

The topics covered by the course are concepts of electromagnetism, properties of waves, and fluid mechanics. ...

Description

This lecture covers the different aspects of polarization effects in electromagnetic waves interacting with matter, including the concept of monochromatic waves, velocities of e-m waves in metals, decomposition in p- and s-polarized waves, birefringence, and stress analysis in transparent materials. It also discusses the decay length of green light in aluminum according to Lambert-Beer law.

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Instructor

Dirk Grundler

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Related concepts (31)

Birefringence

Birefringence is the optical property of a material having a refractive index that depends on the polarization and propagation direction of light. These optically anisotropic materials are said to be birefringent (or birefractive). The birefringence is often quantified as the maximum difference between refractive indices exhibited by the material. Crystals with non-cubic crystal structures are often birefringent, as are plastics under mechanical stress.

Monochromatic radiation

In physics, monochromatic radiation is electromagnetic radiation with a single constant frequency. When that frequency is part of the visible spectrum (or near it) the term monochromatic light is often used. Monochromatic light is perceived by the human eye as a spectral color. When monochromatic radiation propagates through vacuum or a homogeneous transparent medium, it has a single constant wavelength. No radiation can be totally monochromatic, since that would require a wave of infinite duration as a consequence of the Fourier transform's localization property (cf.

Polarization (physics)

Polarization (also polarisation) is a property of transverse waves which specifies the geometrical orientation of the oscillations. In a transverse wave, the direction of the oscillation is perpendicular to the direction of motion of the wave. A simple example of a polarized transverse wave is vibrations traveling along a taut string (see image); for example, in a musical instrument like a guitar string. Depending on how the string is plucked, the vibrations can be in a vertical direction, horizontal direction, or at any angle perpendicular to the string.

Sinusoidal plane wave

In physics, a sinusoidal plane wave is a special case of plane wave: a field whose value varies as a sinusoidal function of time and of the distance from some fixed plane. It is also called a monochromatic plane wave, with constant frequency (as in monochromatic radiation). For any position in space and any time , the value of such a field can be written as where is a unit-length vector, the direction of propagation of the wave, and "" denotes the dot product of two vectors.

QR decomposition

In linear algebra, a QR decomposition, also known as a QR factorization or QU factorization, is a decomposition of a matrix A into a product A = QR of an orthonormal matrix Q and an upper triangular matrix R. QR decomposition is often used to solve the linear least squares problem and is the basis for a particular eigenvalue algorithm, the QR algorithm. Any real square matrix A may be decomposed as where Q is an orthogonal matrix (its columns are orthogonal unit vectors meaning ) and R is an upper triangular matrix (also called right triangular matrix).

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