written by Kiril Simov and Wolfgang Christian

The Quarter Wave Plate program displays the effect of a quarter wave plate on an incident electromagnetic wave.   The default electromagnetic wave is plane polarized but this polarization can be changed by specifying the components of the wave's Jones vector using the input fields.  The slider can be used to rotate the quarter wave plate to change its orientation.    

Quarter Wave Plate is an Open Source Physics program written for the teaching of optics.  It is distributed as a ready-to-run (compiled) Java archive.  Double clicking the optics_quarterwave.jar file will run the program if Java is installed.  Other optics programs are also available.  They can be found by searching ComPADRE for Open Source Physics, OSP, or Optics.

• Download optics_quarterwave.jar - 586kb Java Archive File

Last Modified May 18, 2008

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