Nonreciprocal effects in light reflection by a moving medium

Nonreciprocal effects in light reflection by a medium moving along an interface are considered in a weakly relativistic approximation. It is found that nonreciprocal effects are anomalously large in the vicinity of the Brewster and the total-internal-reflection (TIR) angles when light is reflected by transparent moving media. These effects exceed considerably (by several orders of magnitude) the ratio of the velocity of the reflecting medium to the velocity of light and can be proportional to rather than to under certain conditions. We show new possibilities for the creation a method for investigation of the structure of nonuniform flows with a very small spatial scale (less than one millimeter). This method is based on measurement of amplitude and phase nonreciprocities in light reflection by these flows.Institute of Applied Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Nizhny Novgorod. Translated from Izvestiya Vysshikh Uchebnykh Zavedenii, Radiofizika, Vol. 38, No. 11, pp. 1146–1157, November, 1995.