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Measuring the Faraday effect in olive oil using permanent magnets and Malus' law

Carr, Daniel Luke; Spong, Nicholas L.R.; Hughes, Ifan Glyndwr; Adams, Charles S

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Authors

Daniel Luke Carr



Abstract

We present a simple permanent magnet set-up that can be used to measure the Faraday effect in gases, liquids and solids. By fitting the transmission curve as a function of polarizer angle (Malus' law) we average over short-term fluctuations in the laser power and can extract phase shifts as small as ± 50 μrads. We have focused on measuring the Faraday effect in olive oil and find a Verdet coefficient of V = 192 ± 1 deg T-1 m-1 at approximately 20 °C for a wavelength of 659.2 nm. We show that the Verdet coefficient can be fit with a Drude-like dispersion law A / (λ2 - λ0 2) with coefficients A = 7.9 ± 0.2 × 107 deg T-1 m-1 nm2 and λ0 = 142 ± 13 nm.

Citation

Carr, D. L., Spong, N. L., Hughes, I. G., & Adams, C. S. (2020). Measuring the Faraday effect in olive oil using permanent magnets and Malus' law. European Journal of Physics, 41(2), Article 025301. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6404/ab50dd

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 24, 2019
Online Publication Date Jan 13, 2020
Publication Date Jan 1, 2020
Deposit Date Oct 25, 2019
Publicly Available Date Jan 13, 2021
Journal European Journal of Physics
Print ISSN 0143-0807
Electronic ISSN 1361-6404
Publisher IOP Publishing
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 41
Issue 2
Article Number 025301
DOI https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6404/ab50dd

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