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Magnets + Lasers?

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i dont get the distortion thing, i've never seen distortion on a window

maybe some blue-ish window from a skyscraper that presents a moire effect from the coating
 





Magnets do not bend light. Period. Like Zom-b said, if this were true then all super powerful magnets would have a distorted look about them.

However, magnets CAN bend beams of charged particles (like in a tv, laser tube, etc)

As far as I know, only gravity can bend light.
 
The effects that magnets have are on charged particles. It comes from the lorentz force equation

F=q*(E+vxB)

There will be a force F on a particle if it is charged (the q is the charge). The force will be from the electric field E and/or the cross product of the velocity of the charged particle with a magnetic field B. This is how the electron beam in a CRT is moved across the screen.

Since photons do not have charge they will not be affected directly by an electric or magnetic field. However, the magnetic field can cause changes in the medium (any medium, including vacuum) the photons are propagating through and therefore it is possible to affect the photons propagation with a magnet. For example, in some crystals and also in plasma the effective optical path length for left and right circular polarization is different depending on the presence and orientation of a magnetic field. This is known as Faraday rotation. There are many other things that happen in plasmas when magnetic fields are present that changes how light propagates, or if it even does propagate, sometimes it will be absorbed due to the presence of a particular magnetic field geometry.

I dont know of any specific examples of bending photons with a magnetic field but there might be some out there.
 
arent photons that come out of the diode charged?? how come i cant have an effect on an electromagnetic field with a powerful enough magnetic field?

what's the magnetic field (in tesla) of the sun?
 
nikokapo said:
arent photons that come out of the diode charged??
Click to expand...

Uh, no. Photons can't carry charge. They may have a lot of energy with them, but no +ve or -ve charges or anything, and that's what you need to be affected in a magnetic field.
 
ohhhh, that explains it then.

man, i really need some physics classes....
industrial engineering is gonna help :)

thx for the answers.
 
You can "bend" plasma with a magnet, you get some pretty cool effects from that ;D
 
Who says magents can't bend a laser beam? All you have to do is polish the magnet and put it in the path of the beam. :P Yes, I know that isn't causing it to bend but it still causes the light to go off in another direction.
 
Electromagnets are utilized in high-powered ion lasers (argon, xenon, krypton) to concentrate the plasma arc and increase power. My argon has 4 large electromagnets.

Regular magnets would heat up and loose their field.
 
Magnets can not bend light as far as I know so I definitely agree with what has been said. Magnetic fields can have an effect on light though. I don't think anything happens within a vacuum, but in a lot of dielectrics, aka glass, plastic, etc, you can rotate the polarization of the light. This is not the magnetic field directly affecting the light, but rather changing the properties of the medium.

Gravity is another one of those weird deals that doesn't directly affect the light, but rather it distorts space-time. A lot of you have probably seen some of the visualization of this on tv or elsewhere, but if you haven't imagine a marble on a sheet of some sort. The marble will sink down and deform the sheet. If you were to roll another marble to the side of the first, its path would be bent toward the hole. The same thing basically happens to light.
 
So then photons aren't attracted by gravity? So do they have mass or not then? :-/
 
photons are massless, dimensionless particles. They are basically made up. There is no way (at least not at this point and probably never) for us to visualize light itself so to speak. Light behaves both as a wave and a particle so someone decided to call the particles of light photons. Physicists tend to just make things up to describe what they see and sweep the problems with it under the rug. It gets a lot worse when you start including quantum and classical physics together.
 
Uh huh....Yea, that raises a lot of questions in my mind. :P I always thought light has mass because it's being affected by gravity.
 
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's more about perspective. If you're looking along the beam through space it won't appear to bend.

But if you look at it perpendicular to the beam, it appears to.

Switch. Go to Uni, do Physics :)
 
nikokapo said:
good lord Chuck..

will you build a hand-powered one (mechanical)?



i dont remember the name, but when i went to USA (Cleveland, OH) i was taken to the science museum, and there was this huge IDK-if-it-was-a-van-de-graff machine but when you touched it, static electricity made your hair spike like hell

am i wrong?
Click to expand...

Thats the one Niko but no not hand powered, small motor to move the belt, building the bowl with two ikea stainless steel salad bowls LOL
 
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