Photonics Dictionary: W

An optical element having two principal axes, slow and fast, that resolve an incident polarized beam into two mutually perpendicular polarized beams. The emerging beam recombines to form a particular...

Any type of interference produced by a beamsplitter.

Gas laser in which the tube acts as a channel for the laser beam.

A beamsplitting mirror that reflects as a function of wavelength.

Also known as cathode-ray tube grid or shield. A cylindrically shaped electrode that, containing the cathode of a cathode-ray tube with opposite potential, is designed to focus and control the...

The Weissenberg method, named after the German physicist Karl Weissenberg, is a technique used in x-ray crystallography for obtaining high-quality diffraction patterns from single crystals. This...

A refractometer that has a greater resolving power than a standard refractometer, and that uses a pentagonal prism to split the light from a single slit into two beams.

A polarizing prism consisting of two calcite prisms cemented such that they deviate the two emerging beams (which are mutually perpendicularly polarized) by nearly equal amounts in opposite...