Circularly and elliptically polarized light under water and the Umov effect

Total internal reflection occurs when light is incident on the interface of high- and low-refractive-index materials at an angle greater than the critical angle. Sunlight with high degree of linear polarization, such as atmospheric scattered skylight, can be converted with a high efficiency up to 53% to circular and elliptical polarizations by total internal reflection under water in the region outside Snell’s window. The degree of circular polarization is observed to be inversely dependent on the albedo of underwater objects and is shown to be a direct consequence of the Umov effect. Our results are important for underwater polarimetry, surveillance applications and studies of marine animals’ polarized vision near the water-air interface.

[1]  Joseph A Shaw,et al.  Effects of surface reflectance on skylight polarization measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory. , 2011, Optics express.

[2]  E. Zubko,et al.  Vertical profile of polarization over Vladivostok using horizon shadowing: Clues to understanding the altitude variation of reflectance of aerosol particles , 2018 .

[3]  Dennis H. Goldstein,et al.  Polarized Light, Revised and Expanded , 2003 .

[4]  Yoav Y. Schechner,et al.  Active Polarization Descattering , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[5]  Alexander G. Cheroske,et al.  Evolutionary variation in the expression of phenotypically plastic color vision in Caribbean mantis shrimps, genus Neogonodactylus , 2006 .

[6]  S. Berthier,et al.  Circular Polarization in Nature: Factual, Theoretical and Experimental Summary , 2014 .

[7]  D. Varjú,et al.  Underwater refraction-polarization patterns of skylight perceived by aquatic animals through Snell's window of the flat water surface , 1995, Vision Research.

[8]  E. Zubko,et al.  The Umov effect for single irregularly shaped particles with sizes comparable with wavelength , 2011 .

[9]  Kaushik Balakrishnan,et al.  Polarization microscope using a near infrared full-Stokes imaging polarimeter. , 2015, Optics express.

[10]  J. Hummelen,et al.  Circular polarization observed in bioluminescence , 1980, Nature.

[11]  Jeremy Bailey,et al.  Astronomical Sources of Circularly Polarized Light and the Origin of Homochirality , 2001, Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere.

[12]  R. Chipman,et al.  Mueller Matrices , 2018, Polarized Light and Optical Systems.

[13]  The Nature of Jets: Evidence from Circular Polarization Observations , 2000, astro-ph/0011515.

[14]  D. Stork,et al.  Polarized light in nature , 1985 .

[15]  Evolution of circular and linear polarization in scattering environments. , 2015, Optics express.

[16]  Feng Chen,et al.  Detection of circular polarization in light scattered from photosynthetic microbes , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[17]  Abhijeet Ghosh,et al.  Circularly polarized spherical illumination reflectometry , 2010, SIGGRAPH 2010.

[18]  D. Goldstein.  Polarization properties of Scarabaeidae. , 2006, Applied optics.

[19]  N. Marshall,et al.  Circularly Polarized Light as a Communication Signal in Mantis Shrimps , 2015, Current Biology.

[20]  J Scott Tyo,et al.  Review of passive imaging polarimetry for remote sensing applications. , 2006, Applied optics.

[21]  Ming C. Lin,et al.  Free-flowing granular materials with two-way solid coupling , 2010, SIGGRAPH 2010.

[22]  The Umov effect in application to an optically thin two-component cloud of cosmic dust , 2018 .

[23]  Justin Marshall,et al.  Patterns and properties of polarized light in air and water , 2011, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[24]  B. Hapke.  Theory of reflectance and emittance spectroscopy , 1993 .

[25]  R R Alfano,et al.  Circular polarization memory of light. , 2005, Physical review. E, Statistical, nonlinear, and soft matter physics.

[26]  Justin Marshall,et al.  Circular Polarization Vision in a Stomatopod Crustacean , 2008, Current Biology.

[27]  G. Kornienko,et al.  Umov effect in asteroid (3200) Phaethon , 2018, Astronomy & Astrophysics.

[28]  Nicholas W. Roberts,et al.  Circularly polarized colour reflection from helicoidal structures in the beetle Plusiotis boucardi , 2007 .