Study the Effect of the Sugar Solutions on the Rotation of the Plane of Polarization

• Main Author: Dina J. Matti
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Al-Nahrain Journal for Engineering Sciences 2014-01-01
• Series: مجلة النهرين للعلوم الهندسية
• Online Access: https://nahje.com/index.php/main/article/view/209

This paper deals with studying the effect of the polarization properties of sucrose solution (sugar which is dissolved in distilled water) as an active material and proves the ability of this solution to rotate the plane of polarized light that passes through it with an angle (θ) which is called the angle of rotation.Angle of rotation depends on the molecular structure, the concentration of the dissolved substance, the path length of the light that passes through the solution,and the light wavelength. The method of measuring the transmitted power and angle of rotation is called “optical activity”. Two types of light source are used. The first one was the xenon lamp and chooses three color from it (red, green, and blue) using the proper filters, and the second source was He-Ne laser of wavelength 632nm. In each case, the rotation angle and transmitted power were measured and the specific angle of rotation was calculated at different concentrations of the solution. The benefit of this work, as an optical laboratory application to measure optical properties of various materials, including circular birefringence (optical rotation). It has been found that the effect of polarized solution on the rotation angles was very large for blue light when comparing with red, because of these measured angles depends on increasing polarized solution concentrations and due to the short wavelength of blue light with respect to green and red lights.