Scientists have recently discovered an interaction between an electromagnetic wave and its own magnetic component as it passes through a material, updating a 180-year-old assumption that only accounted for the interaction between light and its electric field.

This phenomenon, the Faraday effect (FE), was first described in 1845 by Michael Faraday, providing some of the earliest evidence of interaction between magnetism and light waves.

It describes how a beam of light passing through a transparent material is affected when that material is subjected to a magnetic field. Specifically, this changes the direction of polarization of that light beam.

For a simplified perspective, light can be unpolarized or polarized . When light is unpolarized, its electromagnetic oscillations occur

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