Uniaxial materials, light propagation

This describes the x and y components of the electric vector of light propagating along the z axis and through an isotropic material of refractive index n. Evidently, the light has had a prior interaction with an anisotropic material and these two components have differing amplitudes and phases. For example, in section 1.2.1, a sample with a uniaxial dielectric tensor was observed to induce a phase difference, 8X - 8y = (2k/X) (n, - n2) d, where... 

The GOA has been widely used in the study of light propagation in photoelastic materials and liquid crystals. Recently, Ong and Meyer presented a general GOA formalism for wave propagation in optically inhomogeneous, planar, uniaxial media and found excellent agreement between the zeroth-order GOA and the exact solution for the case of a periodically bent nematic liquid crystal. The approach of Ong and Meyer, however, is restricted to linearly polarized light in planar structures. 

Light Propagation through Uniaxial Materials (Jones Method)... 

Propagation of light through a uniaxial, anisotropic material. 

Birefringence (or double refraction) is an optical property of structurally anisotropic crystals. Such materials transform an incident light beam into two perpendicularly linearly polarized rays, the ordinary and extraordinary (e) rays, which propagate at different velocities in the medium. Unless the direction of incidence coincides with that of the optical axis of the (uniaxial) crystal, the e ray emerging from the crystal is displaced parallel to the o ray in the plane of the particular principal section of the crystal (see, for example. Ref 2). The well-known double images that appear when an object is viewed through a polished calcite crystal are a manifestation of the phenomenon. 

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