Couette rheometer 2026-10-20
Concentric cylinders impose shear while torque and rotation measure a material's response. The displayed calibration holds for Newtonian laminar flow, inner-cylinder rotation and a stationary outer cylinder. In a narrow gap, the rate is approximately and inner-wall stress is . End effects, wall slip and inertial secondary flow require control.
Faraday effect Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
The Faraday effect is magnetic field-induced circular birefringence: opposite circular polarizations acquire different wave phases, rotating transmitted linear polarization. For a transparent medium with isotropy before applying the magnetic field, in the linear magnetic-response regime at fixed vacuum wavelength and temperature ,
Here is the Verdet constant, is the material path length, and is the applied magnetic flux density component along the ray. This is the external bias, distinct from the oscillating magnetic field of the light itself. Michael Faraday discovered the effect in 1845.[ref]
Fix the sign before using the formula. On the forward path choose a right-handed Cartesian coordinate system, propagation along , and measure from toward for the electric field's oscillation line. Positive is counterclockwise in the -right, -up end view seen from , looking toward the source. Then and positive means positive rotation for positive . This convention differs from the clockwise-positive convention in optical rotation. A linear polarization line is unchanged by ; a measured orientation determines accumulated rotation only modulo , unless continuity selects a branch.
For uniform , the formula reduces to . Its appeal is that a weak change of refractive index becomes a visible change of orientation. Magnetic reversal measurement of Faraday rotation turns this into an inference of or of the magnetic field path integral. Faraday rotation on a round trip explains the directional behavior used by an optical isolator. In an astronomical cold plasma, the high-frequency limit instead leads to the rotation measure law ; that wavelength dependence is not a universal law for transparent solids.
Long-path projection of a magnetic correlation Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
For constant electron density, common path length , and a solenoidal isotropic spectral tensor, the rotation-measure correlation contains the window . As becomes large compared with the correlation length, this window acts as within the integral. The transverse projector then has component one, yielding the displayed two-dimensional Fourier transform. For finite , the windowed integral retains longitudinal modes and endpoint corrections. The method of using such rotation measure correlations to infer magnetic spectra is developed by Enßlin and Vogt.
Write the transverse displacement as and take the common line-of-sight interval to be . The rotation measure is a line integral of the magnetic field, so its correlation is
Substitute the Fourier inversion of the solenoidal isotropic spectral tensor. Keeping the finite observation length gives the exact windowed expression
The allowed extension of the longitudinal displacement integral to the whole real line is the long-path projection of a magnetic correlation. It applies when is much larger than the correlation length: equivalently, the squared window becomes inside the integral. The Dirac delta function sets , leaving
Statistical isotropy makes this a function of . The displayed two-dimensional relation is the intended long-path approximation; the preceding windowed formula accounts for finite-length edge effects.
Rotation measure Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-18
For the high-frequency Faraday effect in a cold plasma, the rotation measure is the coefficient in . It is a density-weighted line integral of the line-of-sight magnetic field; the coefficient depends on the units. A sign convention for the line of sight fixes its sign. Correlations across an extended source can constrain a foreground magnetic energy spectrum, subject to statistical assumptions.