ABSTRACT
The interaction of light beams with matter is described using the Fresnel equations for reflection and transmission. The fact that we must deal with polarized light becomes immediately apparent when we perform the Fresnel equations derivation. We shall see in this chapter that the mathematical formalism we have developed to describe polarized light (i.e., the Stokes vectors and Mueller matrices) is ideally suited to the formulation of the Fresnel equations [1].
