 Waveplates in general as well as polarizers can be described using the Jones matrix formalism, which uses a vector to represent the polarization state of light and a matrix to represent the linear transformation of a waveplate or polarizer.Although the birefringence Δ"n" may vary slightly due to dispersion, this is negligible compared to the variation in phase difference according to the wavelength of the light due to the fixed path difference (λ0 in the denominator in the above equation).Waveplates are thus manufactured to work for a particular range of wavelengths.