Dichroism

An example is the dichroic prism, used in some camcorders, which uses several coatings to split light into red, green and blue components for recording on separate CCD arrays, however it is now more common to have a Bayer filter to filter individual pixels on a single CCD array.

[3] Since the left- and right-handed circular polarizations represent two spin angular momentum (SAM) states, in this case for a photon, this dichroism can also be thought of as spin angular momentum dichroism and could be modelled using quantum mechanics.

], such as tourmaline, the strength of the dichroic effect varies strongly with the wavelength of the light, making them appear to have different colours when viewed with light having differing polarizations.

[dubious – discuss] This is more generally referred to as pleochroism,[4] and the technique can be used in mineralogy to identify minerals.

In some materials, such as herapathite (iodoquinine sulfate) or Polaroid sheets, the effect is not strongly dependent on wavelength.