Findings published in Nature settle the dispute: phonons can be chiral. This fundamental concept, discovered using circular X-ray light, sees phonons twisting like a corkscrew through quartz.
Condensed Matter
12 hours ago
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17
Climate scientists at Rice University have discovered an "internally generated periodicity"—a natural cycle that repeats every 150 days—in the north-south oscillation of atmospheric pressure patterns that drive the movement ...
Earth Sciences
Jun 6, 2023
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91
Climate change-driven shifts in the circulation of waters to the deepest reaches of the ocean around Antarctica, which could reverberate across the planet and intensify global warming, are happening decades "ahead of schedule", ...
Environment
May 28, 2023
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333
Approximately 700,000 years ago, a "warm ice age" permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth. Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded. A European research team ...
Earth Sciences
May 16, 2023
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41
A team of space scientists from Finland, Greece and the U.S. has found evidence showing that polarized optical emissions observed during a tidal disruption event were caused by colliding streams of material from a destroyed ...
A new study published in Nature Geoscience carried out by Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council and other international partners, shows that ...
Earth Sciences
May 10, 2023
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26
Mid-wavelength infrared (MWIR) as one of the most important transparent atmosphere windows is less sensitive to interference from the background emission of the sun, providing a high-transmission zone for the finger-print ...
Optics & Photonics
May 9, 2023
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2
No matter where we go in the universe, we're going to need water. Thus far, human missions to Earth orbit and the moon have taken water with them. But while that works for short missions, it isn't practical in the long term. ...
Space Exploration
May 8, 2023
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19
Politicians who are the parents of daughters provide researchers with a "natural experiment" to test how personal circumstances influence legislators' roll call votes. Research published in 2008, by author Ebonya Washington, ...
Social Sciences
May 1, 2023
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2
When one thinks of the damage that climate change is doing, it's probable that what comes to mind is a vision of huge lumps of ice dropping off one of the polar ice sheets and crashing into the ocean. While Greenland and ...
Planetary Sciences
Apr 27, 2023
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107
Polarization (also polarisation) is a property of waves that describes the orientation of their oscillations. This article primarily covers the polarization of electromagnetic waves such as light, although other types of wave also exhibit polarization.
By convention, the polarization of light is described by specifying the direction of the wave's electric field. When light travels in free space, in most cases it propagates as a transverse wave—the polarization is perpendicular to the wave's direction of travel. In this case, the electric field may be oriented in a single direction (linear polarization), or it may rotate as the wave travels (circular or elliptical polarization). In the latter cases, the oscillations can rotate rightward or leftward in the direction of travel, and which of those two rotations is present in a wave is called the wave's chirality or handedness. In general the polarization of an electromagnetic (EM) wave is a complex issue. For instance in a waveguide such as an optical fiber, or for radially polarized beams in free space, the description of the wave's polarization is more complicated, as the fields can have longitudinal as well as transverse components. Such EM waves are either TM or hybrid modes.
For longitudinal waves such as sound waves in fluids, the direction of oscillation is by definition along the direction of travel, so there is no polarization. In a solid medium, however, sound waves can be transverse. In this case, the polarization is associated with the direction of the shear stress in the plane perpendicular to the propagation direction. This is important in seismology.
Polarization is significant in areas of science and technology dealing with wave propagation, such as optics, seismology, telecommunications and radar science. The polarization of light can be measured with a polarimeter.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
