Polarisation of Transverse Waves

We can classify waves into 2 types:

1. Longitudinal: the thing that is waving is in the same

direction as the velocity of the wave. Examples include sound waves and a wave traveling down a slinky. A Flash animation of a sound wave may be accessed by clicking on the blue button to the right; it will appear in a separate window and has a file size of 30k. You can see that the thing that is waving, the air molecules, are oscillating in the same direction as the wave velocity. 2. Transverse: the thing that is waving is perpendicular to the velocity of the wave. Examples include water waves and waves on a string. It turns out that light is a transverse wave of electric and magnetic fields. A Flash animation of a light wave may be accessed by clicking on the red button to the right; it too will appear in a separate window and has a file size of 120k. You can see that the electric and magnetic fields are perpendicular to each other and to the direction of motion of the wave.

A moment's reflection will convince you that a transverse wave can have the plane of the oscillation at different orientations. The plane is called the polarisation of the wave. The following figures illustrate for the electric and magnetic fields of a light wave; the electric field is represented by the red arrows and the magnetic field by the blue arrows. The two polarisations are at right angles to each other.

Light generated by, say, a light bulb is a mixture of all the possible polarisations; we call such a light wave unpolarised.

Polarization is

a property of certain types of waves that describes the orientation of their oscillations. Electromagnetic waves, such as light, and gravitational waves exhibit polarization; acoustic waves (sound waves) in a gas or liquid do not have polarization because the direction of vibration and direction of propagation are the same. By convention, the polarization of light is described by specifying the orientation of the wave's electric field at a point in space over one period of the oscillation. When light travels in free space, in most cases it propagates as a transverse wavethe polarization is perpendicular to the wave's direction of travel. In this case, the electric field may be oriented in a single direction (linear polarization), or it may rotate as the wave travels (circular or elliptical polarization). In the latter cases, the oscillations can rotate either towards the right or towards the left in the direction of travel. Depending on which rotation is present in a given wave it is called the wave's chirality or handedness. In general the polarization of an electromagnetic (EM) wave is a complex issue. For instance in a waveguide such as an optical fiber, or for radially polarized beams in free space,[1] the description of the wave's polarization is more complicated, as the fields can have longitudinal as well as transverse components. Such EM waves are either TM or hybrid modes. For longitudinal waves such as sound waves in fluids, the direction of oscillation is by definition along the direction of travel, so there is no polarization. In a solid medium, however, sound waves can be transverse. In this case, the polarization is associated with the

direction of the shear stress in the plane perpendicular to the propagation direction. This is important in seismology.

Polarisation by Reflection
Edwin Land, a Harvard dropout, invented the polaroid filters discussed in the previous section, in 1926. Before then the main way of producing a polarised beam of light was using a property of reflected light which is discussed in this section. In the figure to the right, 2 beams of light are incident from behind and above onto a slab of glass. The polarisation of the beam closest to you, as given by the orientation of the shown electric field, is parallel to the surface of the glass. The polarisation of the other beam is perpendicular to this. If the angle of incidence of the beams is at a critical angle, called the Brewster angle, then all of the beam closest to you is reflected and all of the other beam is refracted into the glass. This is the situation that is shown. If n is the index of refraction of the glass, then the Brewster angle is given by:

At angles of incidence not equal to the Brewster angle, the reflected ray will still have more of the polarisation parallel to the surface of the glass than the perpendicular polarisation. Good sunglasses
include polarisers in their lenses to filter out this polarisation. Thus the lenses tend to filter out reflected glare.

Quasars are the brilliant cores of remote galaxies, at the hearts of which lie supermassive black holes that can generate enough power to outshine the Sun a trillion times. These mighty power sources are fuelled by interstellar gas, thought to be sucked into the hole from a surrounding "accretion disk".
Such black holes and their accretion disks are thought to be in a messy environment surrounded by many clouds of dust. This has confused astronomers who tried to study the spectrum of the black hole vicinity - the strong emission from these clouds badly contaminates their precious spectrum. "Astronomers were puzzled by the fact that the most extensively studied models of these disks couldn't quite be reconciled with some of the observations, in particular, with the fact that these disks did not appear as blue as they s Polaroid Filters Polaroid filters are capable of selecting a particular polarisation state from an incident light wave. By

convention the polarisation of a light wave is specified by the orientation of the electric field.

To the right we imagine an light wave incident from the left onto a polaroid filter. If the incident wave is unpolarised, then one-half of the wave will emerge from the polaroid filter. We call this orientation of the polaroid zero degrees, and the orientation is indicated by a red arrow.

If the incident wave is unpolarised, then the orientation of the polaroid filter doesn't matter: for any orientation of a perfect filter exactly one-half of the incident wave will emerge. The figures illustrates for an orientation of 45 degrees.

If we place a second filter behind the first with the same orientation, the second filter has no effect: one-half of the incident beam emerges from the first filter and all of that beam emerges from the second filter.

If the first filter is oriented at 0 degrees and the second filter is oriented at 45 degrees, one-half of the light incident on the second polaroid emerges. Thus one-half of one-half = onequarter of the incident ray emerges from the combination of filters.

Similarly, if the first filter is oriented at 45 degrees and the second at 90 degrees, one-quarter of the incident beam emerges from the combination. In general, if the angles between the 2 filters is then the intensity of the light that emerges from the combination of filters is:

This is called Malus' Law.

If we place a second filter behind the first one that is oriented at 90 degrees relative to the first one, no light emerges from the second filter. This is perhaps expected, since the 2 polarisations that are being selected by the filters are perpendicular to each other. This is also the result predicted by Malus' Law.

We have just seen that if the 2 filters are oriented at 90 degrees relative to each other, the second filter stops all of the light incident on it. Perhaps surprisingly, if we place a filter oriented at 45 degrees between these 2 polaroids, it turns out that some of the light emerges from the 90 degree polaroid. This can be viewed as a consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle from Quantum Mechanics. hould be", explains Makoto Kishimoto from MPIfR. However, an international team of astronomers, led by Kishimoto, found a clever way to get around this. Since the disk light is scattered in the vicinity of the disk and thus appears polarised, they could use the polarised light to separate the disk from the surrounding dust clouds.

Figure 2: Artists's impression of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). A supermassive black hole in the very center is surrounded by an accretion disk and messy dust clouds. Strong jets radiate perpendicular to the accretion disk. Image: NASA E/PO - Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet (Click image for higher resolution).

For their observations in the infrared, they used polarising filters at some of the largest telescopes on Earth - one of the 8.2m VLT telescopes at the Paranal observatory of ESO in Chile as well as the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This enabled them to get rid of emission from hot dust outside the accretion disk, and they could demonstrate that the disk spectrum is as blue as predicted. Dr. Robert Antonucci of the University of California at Santa Barbara, a fellow investigator, says: "Our understanding of the physical processes in the disk is still rather poor, but now at least we are confident of the overall picture." The disk behaviour found in the paper is expected to originate in the outermost region of the disk, where important questions are yet to be answered: how and where the disk ends and how material is being supplied to the disk. "In the near future, our new method may pioneer the way to address these questions", says Makoto Kishimoto.

Polarization is significant in areas of science and technology dealing with wave propagation, such as optics, seismology, telecommunications and radar science. The polarization of light can be measured with a polar meter.