Key Terms
- birefringent
- refers to crystals that split an unpolarized beam of light into two beams
- Brewster’s angle
- angle of incidence at which the reflected light is completely polarized
- Brewster’s law
- , where is the medium in which the incident and reflected light travel and is the index of refraction of the medium that forms the interface that reflects the light
- corner reflector
- object consisting of two (or three) mutually perpendicular reflecting surfaces, so that the light that enters is reflected back exactly parallel to the direction from which it came
- critical angle
- incident angle that produces an angle of refraction of
- direction of polarization
- direction parallel to the electric field for EM waves
- dispersion
- spreading of light into its spectrum of wavelengths
- fiber optics
- field of study of the transmission of light down fibers of plastic or glass, applying the principle of total internal reflection
- geometric optics
- part of optics dealing with the ray aspect of light
- horizontally polarized
- oscillations are in a horizontal plane
- Huygens’s principle
- every point on a wave front is a source of wavelets that spread out in the forward direction at the same speed as the wave itself; the new wave front is a plane tangent to all of the wavelets
- index of refraction
- for a material, the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum to that in a material
- law of reflection
- angle of reflection equals the angle of incidence
- law of refraction
- when a light ray crosses from one medium to another, it changes direction by an amount that depends on the index of refraction of each medium and the sines of the angle of incidence and angle of refraction
- Malus’s law
- where is the intensity of the polarized wave before passing through the filter
- optically active
- substances that rotate the plane of polarization of light passing through them
- polarization
- attribute that wave oscillations have a definite direction relative to the direction of propagation of the wave
- polarized
- refers to waves having the electric and magnetic field oscillations in a definite direction
- ray
- straight line that originates at some point
- refraction
- changing of a light ray’s direction when it passes through variations in matter
- total internal reflection
- phenomenon at the boundary between two media such that all the light is reflected and no refraction occurs
- unpolarized
- refers to waves that are randomly polarized
- vertically polarized
- oscillations are in a vertical plane
- wave optics
- part of optics dealing with the wave aspect of light