Photonics Handbook

Photonics is the study of light and other types of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. The impact of photonics on research, technology, navigation, culture, astronomy, forensics, and...

Developed in the early 1990s, the silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) is a solid-state photodetector whose sensitivity to light rivals that of a photomultiplier tube (PMT) in a regime where a few hundred...

Since its first successful operation in 1960 at Hughes Research Labs, the laser technology has been at the center of innovation and research. Semiconductor lasers first made their appearance in 1962...

The term fluorescence is often applied as a synonym for photoluminescence, although luminescence actually covers fluorescence and phosphorescence. Both of these terms describe the process of...

When evaluating the surface of a component, surface roughness can be assessed by eye or by rubbing it with a fingertip. Common expressions include “shiny,” “lusterless and...

Light is a versatile tool for investigating physical and chemical processes in nature. Any specific system being analyzed may, through the light it emits or reflects, communicate information about...

Laser development for the microscopy market continues to be driven by key trends in applications, which currently include superresolution techniques, multiphoton applications in optogenetics and...

Any number of medical, industrial, and analytical applications requires the detection of light. Chemiluminescence, bioluminescence, fluorescence, and atomic absorption are just a few, and all require...

An integrating sphere’s function is to spatially integrate radiant flux (light). However, before one can optimize a sphere design for a particular application, it is important to understand how...

One of the most critical elements of any time-resolved spectroscopy and dynamics experiment is the optical delay line. A typical optical delay line consists of a retroreflector or folding mirrors on...

An optical time-domain reflectometer sends short pulses of light into a fiber and measures its reflections as a function of time. The delay of these reflections to the detector as well as their...

All optical spectrometry techniques rely on the measurement of radiant power. The configuration of the instrument varies based on the measurement technique: absorption, emission, luminescence, or...

Lenses come in a variety of shapes, sizes and materials. They can be made of a single piece of glass or have multiple elements; their surfaces can be spherical, aspheric or cylindrical; they can be...

The scope of optical spectroscopic instrumentation is indeed very broad. Many analytical methods rely on the interaction of radiation with matter and are often described in the context of quantum and...

There are three fundamentally different dispersive phenomena in optical fiber, of which polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is the most complex. In digital multimode fiber systems, a light pulse...

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an experimental tool in fluid mechanics and aerodynamics. The basic principle involves photographic recording of the motion of microscopic particles that follow...

The applications where rapid detection of light is a must are many. They include a wide variety: semiconductor inspection, gene sequencing, oil well logging and high-energy physics. The reasons for...