Photonics Handbook

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...

Silicon photonics is widely considered a key enabling technology for further development of optical interconnect solutions needed to address growing traffic on the internet. From the first submarine...

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...

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...

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...

Hyperspectral imaging spectroscopy has developed dramatically from a large, complex, remote-sensing satellite- or aircraft-based system into a rugged, compact, economically priced imaging and...

A lens collects light from a point on an object and focuses it to a corresponding conjugate point on an image. Under most conditions, the lens fails at this task because of some error in the...

Like other CTDs, the CID imager uses hundreds of thousands (up to 4 million) pixel elements to capture optical images, and converts the light into an electronic charge which may be displayed on a...

Since their invention in the late 1960s, charge-coupled devices, also called CCDs, have found widespread use in imaging applications. Electronic cameras based on CCD technology are used in...

That portion of the spectrum that the eye can see — and its rainbow of colors — is rather small, covering approximately 360 to 830 nm. What colors we perceive depends on wavelength, while...

Reflected-ultraviolet imaging is a rather mysterious area of the imaging field. There is relatively little actual UV imagery to be found on the Internet or in the literature compared to near-infrared...

Some efforts in global optimization research for optical design center around probabilistic methods such as global search. While promising for small problems with few variables, these methods...

Simple Meniscus Lens The simple meniscus lens is almost universally used in inexpensive cameras. To get an image of good quality it must be used with a separate aperture stop, reducing the...