Optical Rotation: Polarimetry of Chiral Solutions

This simulator renders a real polarimeter cell: a beam of plane-polarized light enters a tube filled with chiral molecules — dextrorotatory sucrose, levorotatory fructose, or a racemic mixture that cancels out — and the field vectors that trace the polarization plane twist smoothly along the beam exactly as Biot's law predicts, α = [α]·l·c. Concentration and tube length scale the twist linearly, switching wavelength reshapes it through the Drude single-term dispersion equation for optical rotatory dispersion, and a draggable analyzer lets you rediscover the rotation angle the way a real saccharimeter does — by finding the extinction angle where Malus's law drives the transmitted intensity to zero.