Word.ws English Dictionary

quarter-wave plates

quarter-wave plates is the plural of quarter-wave plate.

Meaning of quarter-wave plate

Noun

quarter-wave plate (plural quarter-wave plates)

  1. A sheet of birefringent material whose thickness is such that the light associated with the larger refractive index is retarded in phase by 90° with respect of that associated with the smaller refractive index; used to convert linearly polarized light into circularly polarized light.

Questions about quarter-wave plates

What is quarter-wave plates the plural of?
Quarter-wave plates is the plural of quarter-wave plate.

Words near quarter-wave plates in the dictionary

  1. quarter-tone
  2. quarter-tones
  3. quarter-up price
  4. quarter-up prices
  5. quarter-wave plate
  6. quarter-wave plates
  7. quarter-wavelength film
  8. quarter-wavelength films
  9. quarter-witted
  10. quarter-yearly
  11. quarter-zip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quarter-wave plates (page history and authors); quarter-wave plate (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “quarter-wave plates.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/quarter-wave_plates. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.