Photonics Dictionary: D

A lidar (light detection and ranging) technique used in pollution monitoring. Two light beams are emitted simultaneously, one at a wavelength that will be absorbed by the target particles, and the...

A spectrophotometer that measures the amount of ozone in the atmosphere through a comparison of solar energy at two wavelengths in the ozone's absorption band. This comparison is achieved by...

A multilayer coating that manifests both a low radiant reflectance and radiant absorption.

The selective absorption of electromagnetic waves by a liquid made up of molecules with permanent dipole movement.

Deep multiphoton microscopy is an advanced imaging technique used in biological and biomedical research to visualize structures and processes deep within tissues with high resolution. It combines the...

Description of a material, such as a water-soluble salt, that will continue absorbing moisture from the surrounding atmosphere until it dissolves into a liquid.

A dichroic coating, also known as a dichroic filter or dichroic mirror, is an optical coating designed to selectively transmit or reflect certain wavelengths of light while simultaneously absorbing...

The ratio between two given absorption coefficients.

Dichroism refers to the property of certain materials to exhibit different colors or absorbance of light depending on the direction of light propagation or polarization. The term is commonly used in...

Glass tinted with mixed oxides of neodymium and praseodymium that, unlike most solid materials, have absorption bands that are very narrow and that have very sharp areas.

A shallow, fine-pitch diffraction grating having a precise dielectric overcoating that experimentally has absorbed wavelength-specific incident light that is polarized in the P-plane.

A method of coding image data by storing in memory only differences in brightness of each pixel from that of its nearest horizontal neighbors: that is, it is the change in brightness rather than the...

Diffraction efficiency is a measure of how effectively a diffractive optical element (DOE) or diffraction grating directs light into specific diffraction orders or achieves a desired optical effect....

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) is a nondestructive analytical technique used to investigate the optical properties of materials, particularly in the field of spectroscopy. Unlike traditional...

A color filter that is designed to gradually increase or decrease its absorption with wavelength.

A diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) is a type of laser system that uses semiconductor diode lasers to pump energy into a solid gain medium, resulting in the generation of coherent light. This...

Spectrophotometry in which radiation of two separate wavelengths, usually one in an absorption band and the other not, pass through the specimen. The resulting data allows correction for attenuation...

In atmospheric optics, the almost total blocking of light transmission in the atmosphere due to the scattering and absorption of the light by dust particles.

A type of erasable data storage device that uses a medium deposited on the disc in two layers, each dyed to absorb a different wavelength of laser light. To record data, the lower layer is heated by...