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Asked in GSEB Board March 2016 · Malus's law and polaroids
Given: the construction of a Nicol prism.
Idea: the prism works by double refraction -- a birefringent crystal splits a beam into an ordinary and an extraordinary ray, polarised at right angles to each other.
Two suitably cut rhombs of calcite (Iceland spar) are cemented together with a thin layer of Canada balsam.
For the ordinary ray the balsam is optically rarer, and at the angle of the cut that ray is totally internally reflected away.
Only the extraordinary ray passes through.
So the two crystals are of calcite, and the emerging beam is plane polarised.
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