Reversal of handedness of circularly polarized light by mirror

A demonstration – simple, cheap & instructive 

For this demonstration you need

• a small pocket mirror (preferably rectangular)
• a pair of 3D movie glasses (circularly polarized) 
• a shiny green rose chafer (dead or alive :) 

The rose chafer (Cetonia aurata) is a very common beetle in Hungary where I live. It comes in different shades of shiny green but natural black also occurs.

Watch the black one to the left. For some reason it lacks the helical structure of chitin molecules that is needed to produce the shiny green color of its neighbor to the right. You will need a green one for the demonstration. I am showing you the black one only for comparison. That's how the green one would look if, somehow, you'd block the circularly polarized light that carries the green color to your eyes.

As you can learn from this Wikipedia article, the color of Cetonia aurata comes from left-handed circularly polarized light. You can easily check this using a circularly polarized filter. That's why you need the 3D movie glasses which have both types of filter. Mine is a masterImage make, whose left filter is left polarized and right filter is right polarized. Easy to remember, see? This video shows you the glasses in action. Make sure that the English SUBTITLES are turned ON!

And here comes the demonstration in three acts: