Polarization by Scattering

When light is incident on any material, the electrons in the material can absorb and reradiate part of the light. Such absorption and reradiation of light by electrons in the gas molecules that make up air is what causes sunlight reaching an observer on the Earth to be partially polarized. You can observe this effect—called scattering—by looking directly up at the sky through a pair of sunglasses whose lenses are made of polarizing material. Less light passes through at certain orientations of the lenses than at others.

Figure 3.11 illustrates how sunlight becomes polarized when it is scattered. The phenomenon is similar to that creating completely polarized light upon reflection from a surface at Brewster’s angle. An unpolarized beam of sunlight traveling in the horizontal direction (parallel to the ground) strikes a molecule of one of the gases that make up air, setting the electrons of the molecule into vibration. These vibrating charges act like the vibrating charges in an antenna. The horizontal component of the electric field vector in the incident wave results in a horizontal component of the vibration of the charges, and the vertical component of the vector results in a vertical component of vibration. If the observer in Figure 3.11 is looking straight up (perpendicular to the original direction of propagation of the light), the vertical oscillations of the charges send no radiation toward the observer.

Figure 3.11. The scattering of unpolarized sunlight by air molecules. The scattered light traveling perpendicular to the incident light is plane-polarized because the vertical vibrations of the charges in the air molecule send no light in this direction.

Thus, the observer sees light that is completely polarized in the horizontal direction, as indicated by the brown arrows. If the observer looks in other directions, the light is partially polarized in the horizontal direction. Some phenomena involving the scattering of light in the atmosphere can be understood as follows. When light of various wavelengths λ is incident on gas molecules of diameter d, where d << λ, the relative intensity of the scattered light varies as 1/ λ4. The condition d << λ is satisfied for scattering from oxygen (O2) and nitrogen (N2) molecules in the atmosphere, whose diameters are about 0.2 nm. Hence, short wavelengths (blue light) are scattered more efficiently than long wavelengths (red light).

Therefore, when sunlight is scattered by gas molecules in the air, the short-wavelength radiation (blue) is scattered more intensely than the long-wavelength radiation (red).

When you look up into the sky in a direction that is not toward the Sun, you see the scattered light, which is predominantly blue; hence, you see a blue sky. If you look toward the west at sunset (or toward the east at sunrise), you are looking in a direction toward the Sun and are seeing light that has passed through a large distance of air. Most of the blue light has been scattered by the air between you and the Sun. The light that survives this trip through the air to you has had much of its blue component scattered and is thus heavily weighted toward the red end of the spectrum; as a result, you see the red and orange colors of sunset.

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