Questions addressed : ♦ Circularly polarized light ♦ Superposition of Circularly polarized light ♦ Elliptically polarized light ♦ Superposition of elliptically polarized light |
In the lecture 3, we have understood the plane polarized light whose electric field direction is always fixed as the wave is propagating and does not change with time. As per our convenience the direction of electric field can be chosen either along x axis or along y axis for the linearly polarized light or in x-y plane for plane polarized light for a wave propagating along z axis.
Let us consider a plane wave having electric field in x-y plane. The amplitude of electric field along x axis is Eox and that of along y axis is Eoy . The x and y components have some phase difference given by 
. The general expression for the electric field for the em wave propagating along z axis of frequency 
is given by
..............................(1)