Photon Polarizer

About

Light waves bob up and down (or even spiral through space) in different directions, a property that scientists call their polarization. In the quantum world, light comprises bundles of discrete blips of energy called photons, and these photons are indivisible: They can't be broken into pieces. So when a photon hits a polarizer, it either goes through or it doesn't. (Not going through usually means that the photon is absorbed or reflected away.) In this graphic, the photon polarization angle sends a stream of photons through one polarizer.

Archive

Wikimedia Commons, in Wikimedia Commons

Licence or status

CC BY-SA 4.0, as the Wikimedia Commons states it.

Rights statement

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Credit

Sean Kelley/The Quantum Atlas

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