Page:A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism - Volume 2.djvu/432

Rh able to detect any action of this kind, though the experiments were arranged in the way best adapted to discover effects of tension, the electric force or current being at right angles to the direction of the ray, and at an angle of forty-five degrees to the plane of polarization. Faraday varied these experiments in may ways without discovering any action on light due to electrolytic currents or to static electric induction.

He succeeded, however, in establishing a relation between light and magnetism, and the experiments by which he did so are described in the nineteenth series of his Experimental Researches. We shall take Faraday's discovery as our starting point for further investigation into the nature of magnetism, and we shall therefore describe the phenomenon which he observed.

807.] A ray of plane-polarized light is transmitted through a transparent diamagnetic medium, and the plane of its polarization, when it emerges from the medium, is ascertained by observing the position of an analyser when it cuts off the ray. A magnetic force is then made to act so that the direction of the force within the transparent medium coincides with the direction of the ray. The light at once reappears, but if the analyser is turned round through a certain angle, the light is again cut off. This shews that the effect of the magnetic force is to turn the plane of polarization, round the direction of the ray as an axis, through a certain angle, measured by the angle through which the analyser must be turned in order to cut off the light.

808.] The angle through which the plane of polarization is turned is proportional—

(1) To the distance which the ray travels within the medium. Hence the plane of polarization changes continuously from its position at incidence to its position at emergence.

(2) To the intensity of the resolved part of the magnetic force in the direction of the ray.

(3) The amount of the rotation depends on the nature of the medium. No rotation has yet been observed when the medium is air or any other gas.

These three statements are included in the more general one, that the angular rotation is numerically equal to the amount by which the magnetic potential increases, from the point at which the ray enters the medium to that at which it leaves it, multiplied by a coefficient, which, for diamagnetic media, is generally positive.

809.] In diamagnetic substances, the direction in which the plane