A Glimpse of Polarisation with Sea Urchins and Gold Nanorods

Abstract

Light is an essential part of the universe and for most living things, it is one of the main avenues we use to experience life. From the astonishing phenomena of sight to telecommunications to probing the entire Universe, our utilisation and manipulation of light and its interactions has not only helped us in our understanding not only biological evolution, but also the evolution of the universe and everything in between. It is therefore of vital importance that we have an understanding of the fundamentals of light and develop a model that can be used not only to explain the current behaviours of light but also use its properties to predict and examine other aspects of the natural laws of the Universe. here is one property of light that we will focus on in this work, namely polarisation.

Polarisation is a fundamental property of light, both classically and quantum mechanically. Classical properties arise from the oscillation of all transverse waves, and quantum mechanically it comes from the spin and helicity of photons. Photons with different polarisation states are intrinsically different, not only in how they behave and interact but also in how they are created.

A measurement of photon polarisation could reveal its origins, including the type of interactions which resolved in its inception. This project is an exploratory work into the development of new ways into polarisation detection. . Although polarisation detectors already exist in the visible wavelengths, improvements can be made on their sensitivity, size, cost, and complexity. We explore avenues into such ideas, using the biological process of polarisation detection that animals have been using for potentially millions of years. Furthermore, I am particularly interested in the development of a high energy (X and γ ray) polarisation detector. Such a detector does not currently exist for γ rays and even hard X-rays. I explore a potential new route of detecting the polarisation of high energy photons.