Ice and polarized light

Daniela Rapava
Citation: The Physics Teacher 53, 320 (2015); doi: 10.1119/1.4917453
View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.4917453
View Table of Contents: http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/tpt/53/5?ver=pdfcov
Published by the American Association of Physics Teachers
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Visual Physics

Ice and polarized light

Daniela Rapava

http://danielaphoto.webnode.sk/fotogaleria/
KHaP M. Hella
Observatory RimavskaSobota
97901 Rimavska Sobota, Slovakia

Submit your own photos of visual

physics: email pictures to
tpt@appstate.edu

Using circular polarizing anti-glare

sheets taken from an old monitor from
her personal computer, Daniela Rapava
fashioned her own polariscope, looking
much like a terrarium (see inset above).
Objects to be photographed (such as ice
formations, or clear plastics or cellophane)
are placed in the polariscope between
two such sheets, polarizer and analyzer.
Sunlight containing all colors enters the
polarizer from the backside and is filtered,
becoming circularly polarized, meaning
the vertical and horizontal components of
the electric field are out of phase by exactly
90 degrees.
The ice is birefringent, thus each colors
vertical and horizontal components travel
through the ice at slightly different speeds,
changing their relative phase. The emerging light signal from a particular region of
the ice still has all the colors but each color
now has a different phase relationship
between its horizontal and vertical components. Thus only one particular color,
the one whose components combine so
that it can make it through the analyzing
filter on the front side of the polariscope,
is the color that dominates the image at
that location. The resulting rainbows hint
at the competing stresses as the ice crystals
were forming.
Note that a bit of melting has occurred
between the two photos; which one would
you say was snapped first?

320

The Physics Teacher Vol. 53, May 2015

DOI: 10.1119/1.4917453
This article is copyrighted as indicated in the article. Reuse of AAPT content is subject to the terms at:
http://scitation.aip.org/termsconditions.
Downloaded to IP:
171.224.67.107 On: Sun, 31 May 2015 08:40:28