Q18 of 805 Page 1

What do you understand by the statement ‘Light from the sun is unpolarised’. Explain how does sunlight gets polarized by the process of scattering?

The light from the sun is unpolarized means that he electric field vectors vibrate in all possible directions in the transverse plane rapidly and randomly.


The polarization of sunlight by the method of scattering:


When the light from the sun enters the earth atmosphere it gets scattered by the molecules of gases in the earth atmosphere produces linearly polarized light in the plane perpendicular to the incident light. If the charges in a molecule are oscillating along the y-axis. Therefore at 90o away from beam direction, the scattered light is linearly polarized. The following diagram shows the polarization of blue light from the sky where the dots stands for polarization perpendicular in the plane of the figure. The double arrow shows the polarization in the plane of the figure.




More from this chapter

All 805 →