Photonics Dictionary: D

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

Dewetting is a phenomenon in materials science and physics where a thin film or coating spontaneously undergoes a process of breaking up and forming isolated droplets on a substrate. This occurs due...

A polarizer that consists of dichroic polarizing material embedded in a plastic sheet, and that transmits light that is almost completely plane polarized with an intensity that is half that of the...

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...

A diffraction grating is an optical component consisting of a surface with a periodic structure of equally spaced, parallel grooves or rulings. These rulings act as an array of closely spaced slits...

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 vacuum pump in which heated oil or another substance is forced through jets as a vapor that collides with gas molecules and carries them away from the chamber being evacuated.

Electric polarization characterized by homogeneous polar dielectrics and ascribed to the position of the permanent molecular dipoles.

In a liquid crystal system, the director refers to the local symmetry axis around which the long range order of the liquid crystal is aligned. In the case of the nematic phase, the molecular long...

The spreading of potentially equal radiation frequencies that results in broadening of the spectral line. This effect is brought about when radiating atoms, molecules or nuclei have different...