Illuminating Optics Education: Open-Source Polarization Hardware for Classrooms

Ensuring physics is engaging, relatable, and understandable is critical in enabling future researchers in science. Teaching the optical properties of light and materials can be enhanced using practical demonstrations. We have developed a demonstration kit that can be used to prepare the principles of the interaction of polarized light with optically active, chiral liquids and birefringent polymers. At a relatively low cost, the kit can be built using mainly 3D printed parts and a few off-the-shelf electronic components, such as LEDs, stepper motors, Arduino microcontroller, and a webcam. The development of various modular frameworks for optical components has benefitted both research and teaching, providing easily reconfigurable demonstrations that can be both low-cost and easily portable. Here, we demonstrate an outreach and educational tool that utilizes magnetic relocatable mounts for the main optical components, allowing the setup to be easily reconfigured between measuring optical rotation and visualizing the effects of birefringence. We present several simple experiments demonstrating key physics topics such as wave propagation, refraction, polarization, and birefringence. Overall, the demonstration kit provides a sandbox for several activities focusing on learning wave propagation and polarization in physics. The setup has potential for use in other aspects of physics, with future work looking to improve and involve different areas such as spectroscopy, fluorescence, and quantum mechanics.