New technologies keep the manufacturers on the track of making TV’s with higher resolution and richer color tones, yet the best image is seen when you hike in the mountains and look around from the summit on a beautiful sunny day. Can that natural view be improved any further? The answer is simple: Put on a pair of polarized sun glasses and you will actually appreciate how much better it gets.
To understand how polarized sunglasses work, we need to first recall that the light is emitted from any source is a large number of electromagnetic waves travelling through space. These waves are disorganized since they are oscillating in all possible planes perpendicular to the direction of propagation. The light stays unpolarized until it is, for example, reflected from the surface of the road and when this happens the polarized light becomes very intense which causes the glare. The reflected waves are mainly in the horizontal plane and if we use sunglasses with vertically polarized lenses, we would get rid of the intense light and enhance our vision. This is what polarized sunglasses do. They do greatly improve our vision, especially when driving for a long trip on sunny highways.
Notice on the picture that if we align two pairs of polarized sunglasses at 90° the plane-polarized light is blocked and we couldn’t see the jelly beans anymore.
The plane-polarized light is also obtained when the light passes through a sample of chiral molecule where one enantiomer is present in larger quantity than the other. This difference in the amount of the enantiomers is called enantiomeric excess which can be calculated using a polarimeter.