Photonics Dictionary

Any isolated wave that propagates without dispersion of energy. Specifically to photonics, an ultrashort pulse of laser light that propagates through a waveguide without characteristic chromatic...

A color center laser whose output is coupled to an external control laser cavity and then fed back to the main laser cavity to provide enhanced pulse shaping, leading to ultrashort pulse generation.

A semiconductor laser that operates in the infrared and that is pumped with strong pulses of radiation from a second laser. Dependent on quantum-mechanical principles, it can be tuned over a large...

A memory system composed of a stack of holographic plates, a mode-locked laser and a rapid detector array. Ultrashort laser pulses are used to extract information from the stack. In this way, storage...

Light from a pulsed laser focused into nonsaturable absorbing fluid that generates a strongly backscattered light beam with a frequency higher than that of the incident light.

A streak camera is a specialized instrument used to capture and analyze ultrafast phenomena, such as extremely short pulses of light or rapidly changing events. Unlike traditional cameras that...

A pulsed interferometer that permits the continuous quantitative mapping of the surface deformation of an adaptive optical element (e.g., a deformable mirror) and provides the capability for...

Supercontinuum refers to a broad spectrum of light that spans a wide range of wavelengths, typically from the visible to the near-infrared or even mid-infrared regions of the electromagnetic...

Observed phenomenon in laser pulses in which a large number of excited electrons are created and in which multiphoton processes have produced seed electrons, and excited neutral atoms are...

The technique of generating ultrashort -- down to subpicosecond -- pulses by pumping a dye laser with mode-locked laser pumps with cavity lengths the same as, or a submultiple of, that of the dye...

Time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) is a technique used in photon counting applications, particularly in the field of experimental physics, biophysics, and fluorescence lifetime imaging...

A Ti:sapphire laser is a type of solid-state laser that utilizes a titanium-doped sapphire crystal as the gain medium. The name Ti:sapphire comes from the combination of titanium (Ti) as the dopant...

Abbreviated TEA CO2 laser. A gas laser that provides shorter pulses and higher peak powers than conventional CO2 lasers. The electrical excitation pulse occurs transversely to the optical axis...

An ultrafast pulsed laser is a type of laser that emits extremely short pulses of light with durations typically on the order of femtoseconds (10-15 seconds) or picoseconds (10-12 seconds). These...

A laser capable of generating light pulses that last only a few femtoseconds. This can be achieved by nonlinear filtering to increase bandwidth and compress the pulse or by passive mode-locking or...

A pulsed laser having molecular nitrogen as laser material and a wavelength output of 337 nm in the ultraviolet region. It is essentially a channel flashtube in which a pulse is applied to the...

Volume Bragg gratings (VBGs) are specialized optical elements that consist of periodic variations in refractive index throughout the volume of a transparent material, typically a photosensitive glass...

Volumetric imaging refers to the capture, visualization, and analysis of three-dimensional (3D) information from a volume of space. Unlike traditional two-dimensional (2D) imaging, which provides...

An extremely wide emission spectrum generated by the nonlinear effects created when a high peak power from a short-pulse laser is focused into a water or carbon tetrachloride cell. The resulting...