Stress-optic law in a single crystal and its application to photo-anisotropic elasticity

Abstract

A general stress-optic law in a plate made of a single crystal with birefringence is developed, the plate has an arbitrary crystallographic direction. From the general stressoptic law, a condition for obtaining stress distributions in the plate under a plane stress state is derived. Some optical and mechanical properties when the plate is used as a photoanisotropic model are also explained. Experiments on silicon beams in pure bending are performed by using an infrared photoelastic method. Experimental results show that the stress-optic law is valid. The optical and mechanical properties of silicon beams are shown in tables.