Wolfram Demonstrations Project

13,000+ Open Interactive Demonstrations
Powered by Notebook Technology »

A Rotating Waveplate Polarization Analyzer

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

This Demonstration lets you create any type of polarized light to see the intensity as the light passes through a polarization analyzer consisting of a rotating waveplate followed by a fixed linear polarizer. There is a constraint on the Stokes vector for partially or completely polarized light: ; if you select , , and that do not fulfill the constraint, an error message is shown. is set to be 1.

[more]

The most common types of light and their Stokes vectors can be set as follows: horizontally polarized light: (1,0,0); vertically polarized light: (-1,0,0), 45° light: (0,1,0); -45° light (0,-1,0); right circularly polarized light (0,0,1); and left circularly polarized light (0,0,-1).

[less]

Contributed by: Beth Schaefer and Edward Collett (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Snapshots

Details

detailSectionParagraph
Embed Code

Take advantage of the Wolfram Notebook Emebedder for the recommended user experience.

Related Demonstrations More by Author
Browse all topics
Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send