Lecture 14: Material Modeling (14)
nugget0702

What would be the normal axis to reference the angle of incidence? And why does polarization of light affect the Fresnal Reflection? Doesn't polarization only affect the transmission of light in one direction, so how do we see its affects?

buggy213

it has to do with the behavior of electromagnetic waves. i'm not really an expert, but you can actually see this effect in the way that sunglasses work - they reduce glare by filtering out light that has been polarized as a result of fresnel reflectance with the ground

jerrymby

Polarized light means there is an uneven distribution of polarization states. Light is just electromagnetic wave which has a direction towards which it oscillates. Polarization state is that direction. You can find more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations. The physics of why this happens can be very involved but the term polarization should be fairly straightforward.

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