Click to download a zip-compressed avi movie file. This box shows the time evolution of the electric and magnetic fields in a linearly-polarized laser beam.
Blue lines indicates the electric field and red lines indicates magnetic fields.
The arrow repesents the direction of propagation of the laser beam. The laser intensity is written at the bottom of the window. The amplitude of the fields plotted is always normalized to the viewing window, so you won't be able to see the change of the amplitude when the laser intensity is changed. This box shows the motion of an electron in the laser beam that is plotted at the right-hand side. At low laser intensities, the electron oscillates up and down in a linear trajectory along the direction of the electric field.