Photonics Dictionary: C

In microscopy, the chamber that is contained on a microscope slide to hold a certain amount of fluid. It is calibrated accurately to determine the number of cells and other elements while the...

Camera Link HS (high speed) is a standard developed for high-speed digital data transmission in machine vision and industrial imaging applications. It is an evolution of the original Camera Link...

Carrier injection refers to the process of introducing charge carriers (either electrons or holes) into a semiconductor material. Semiconductors are materials with electrical conductivity between...

A shower of cosmic rays whereby a high-energy electron produces one or more photons that convert into electron pairs, the secondary electrons producing the same effects as the primary. As the process...

Cathode radiant sensitivity refers to the ability of a photocathode to convert incident radiant energy, typically in the form of light, into an electrical signal. Photocathodes are components used in...

A fiber optic end plate constructed by drawing a bundle of parallel fibers embedded in glass and cutting it into thin slices. These slices are assembled in a plane and heated to produce a...

A CCD image sensor, or charge-coupled device image sensor, is a type of electronic device used to convert optical images into electronic signals. It is a key component in digital cameras, camcorders,...

A rotating chamber that can be spun at different speeds to generate great radial forces used to simulate different gravity loads.

The number of channels per unit bandwidth handled by a single optical fiber.

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment refers to a class of specialized apparatus used in the process of chemical vapor deposition, a technique for depositing thin films of various materials onto...

In morphological image processing, a series of dilations followed by the same number of erosions.

A CMOS image sensor, short for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor image sensor, is a type of semiconductor device used to capture visual information and convert it into electrical signals for...

A coherent fiber bundle (CFB), also known as a coherent fiber optic bundle, is an assembly of multiple optical fibers arranged in a specific geometric pattern to maintain the spatial coherence of...

Cold atoms refer to atoms that have been cooled to extremely low temperatures, typically in the microkelvin (µK) to nanokelvin (nK) range, close to absolute zero (0 Kelvin or -273.15°C). At...

A lens made up of a number of lens elements arranged into two or more groups.

Also called color blocking. The formation of a block by making optical contact between a number of optical elements and a large optical flat.

The maximum number of users who are using a given communication channel. Typically, the number of users at any given time is below this maximum, with the contention rate representing a worst case...

In optical character recognition systems, the identification of a character facilitated by means of known factors governing its appearance in a particular context; e.g., the first character in the...

A crimped metal cylinder that holds the connector to the cable through the cable's strength member.

Calculation of the probability of an interaction between two types of particles, such as light absorption, excitation or energy transfers. The probability that one incident particle will interact as...

Standard maintained by the International Commission on Radiological Units as a unit of radioactivity defined as the quantity of any radioactive nuclide in which the number of disintegrations per...