written by Kiril Simov and Wolfgang Christian

The Half Wave Plate program displays the effect of a half 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 half wave plate to change its orientation.

Half 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_halfwave.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_halfwave.jar - 586kb Java Archive File

Last Modified May 18, 2008

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