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...

Electrical engineers are very familiar with the effects of shot noise, thermal noise, flicker noise and crosstalk, and recognize how these effects can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in their...

Superresolution optical microscopy, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner in 2014, has been one of the most momentous developments in the life...

By its original definition, a nanopositioning device is a mechanism capable of repeatedly delivering motion in increments as small as one nanometer. Lately demands from industry and research have...

With the understanding of aspheric lens manufacturing provided in part one of this article, designers have the tools to optimize their aspheres; the next step is to understand how to specify 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...

Optical design software allows the user to develop a configuration of optical elements that manipulate the trajectory of light for the purposes of creating an image, illuminating a target, coupling...

Camera resolution depends upon the optical blur diameter and the detector size. Schade combined these to create an equivalent resolution that is a function of Fλ/d where F is the focal ratio,...

When physical structures get very small — on the order of molecular or atomic sizes with one or more dimensions on the nanoscale — their behavior and interactions with energy, including...

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...

In the search for ever-higher pixel counts for the digital still camera, it is clear that, if chip size remains constant, then “more pixels” means “smaller pixels.” The...