Faraday Effect
Channel: Williams College Physics
Date: 2020-03-27

Part 6 of the Polarization lab. The Faraday effect is when a material in a magnetic field changes the polarization of light passing through it. Here a glass rod is inside a solenoid so there is a magnetic field along its axis. With a constant field, the polarization axis is rotated a tiny bit and the effect is hard to see by eye. When a photodiode is used for the detector, we can use a few technical tricks to make the effect much more visible.