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Introduction
The polarization of a plane wave describes the
motion of the electric field as a function of time. Light is essentially an electromagnetic wave propagating through
space, and the way the orientation of its electric field varies as the light
propagates is call polarization. The white light we see in our daily life
are usually randomly polarized, that is as the wave propagate, the orientation
of the electric field changes disorderly. However there are special cases,
such as
These are what we called polarized light, and their polarization can be caused by passing a beam through a crystal, a polarizer, or simply by the processes of reflection and refraction.
This applet is a tool to visualize these different states of polarization.