研究実績の概要 |
Wood is a plant tissue composed of hollow cells called fibers. The cellulose occurs as thin (4 nm dimeter) and long (several micrometers) nanofibers and their bundles (10-30 nm diameter) in the fibers, which does not scatte light. Therefore, wood becomes transparent when the opaque brownish lignin is replaced with a transparent resin (Transparent wood: TW). It was found that TW exhibits anisotropic light transmission in which a laser point becomes elongated perpendicular to fiber direction. Based on this finding, we hypothesized that TW might show light polarizing behavior. Therefore, the light polarization performance of TW (WA) was measured using a custom-built equipment. It was demonstrated that the wood definitely polarizes light to a certain degree, which is about 33% at 600 nm.
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