I am looking for illustrations to copy for a talk I will give on 3D movie technology to an audience of physics teachers. I am unfamiliar with optics textbooks (or, perhaps, internet accessible references) that have been published in the last two decades. I would appreciate your recommendations of any textbooks that have either a good discussion of birefringence, or good illustrations, or both.
Though the topic of birefringence is relatively simple and straightforward, I have found in the past that my students had more difficulty internalizing it than many other explanations, even of concepts like entropy. This may well have been a failing of my own teaching, but since I have not given a class lecture on this topic in about twenty years I would like to get it right this time. The hard questions I want to address are "What is circularly polarized light?" and "How do I prepare circularly polarized light?". Because it is important for the detailed explanation of how the RealD 3D system* works, it would be useful to also include explanation of elliptical polarization and chromatic aberration in circular polarizers, but if I succeed in getting the simpler concepts across that will be satisfactory.
Thanks for your help,
Leigh
* I have the benefit of having heard an excellent talk given two weeks ago by Matt Cowan, the inventor who contributed most to the development of the system that is used for films like "Avatar" and "Alice in Wonderland". I want to write my own talk before my understanding fades away.