Polarization, a wave characteristic of light, is the vibrational direction of electromagnetic waves. The polarization state of light is changed by the surrounding environment, and in the case of natural light, the light scattered by small scatters is ...
Polarization, a wave characteristic of light, is the vibrational direction of electromagnetic waves. The polarization state of light is changed by the surrounding environment, and in the case of natural light, the light scattered by small scatters is fully polarized in a certain direction. We designed a simple experiment to observe the polarization of light scattered by small airborne scatterers using the Millikan experiment kit. By impinging 550-nm laser light onto airborne oil droplets, we observed that the scattered light became linearly polarized at a certain angle. For analytical proof, we used the image to extract the RGB value. This design is advantageous for observing the polarization state of scattered light from airborne particles, whose size is a few micrometers, in a relatively simple way.