Dichroism

Such devices include mirrors and filters, usually treated with optical coatings, which are designed to reflect light over a certain range of wavelengths and transmit light which is outside that range.

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.

[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.