Use smartphones to measure Brewster’s angle

Abstract

This study aims to measure Brewster’s angle of glass and acrylic brick with an easy-to-obtain mobile application (app) by changing the tungsten light source to a red laser. The popularization of the smartphone has inspired many to use its various built-in sensors to carry out general physics experiments. Many others have adopted both a laser and a light sensor to perform such measurements. In Refs. 10 and 11, the devices required specific software and are not widely available in physics laboratories. In this paper, we present a similar study, but one that has the advantage that it uses the ambient light sensor of the smartphone. In this work, a simple and inexpensive experimental setup is proposed to quantitatively measure Brewster’s angle.