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Photonics Spectra: October 2008

Photonics Spectra
 October 2008


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FEATURES
The Shape of Displays to Come When you think of displays, you likely think of something flat – flat-screen television, mobile phone screen – but researchers today are developing displays in almost any shape imaginable. The perception that displays are only flat might change in the near future. A 147 × 22-m LED screen wowed the audience during the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. It had approximately...
Soda Can Videos You’ve just finished drinking your favorite soda, but before you recycle the can, imagine that it has a button allowing you to view a music video. Researchers led by Dr. Roel Vertegaal at Queens...
Interacting with the Whole Earth Researchers at Microsoft Corp. recently revealed a device that allows users to interact with an image, such as a globe, projected onto a sphere. To create the prototype display, the researchers...
Displays That Look Back Digital signage is nothing new. Whether in New York City’s Times Square or along the highway, digital signs enable more than one advertisement to appear in a given location, and the quick changes of...
Pocket-Size Roll-Up Displays Displays are becoming tiny, but the smaller they get, the harder it is to see a lot of information at once. Although devices such as the iPhone include ways to zoom in on information in an e-mail or...
CHECK POINT On Sept. 21, 2007 – just six years and 10 days after two planes took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport and rammed into the World Trade Center in New York – MIT undergraduate Star Simpson...
Faster, Stronger, Higher: Lighting, specialized optics and other technologies that can be labeled “protophotonics” were being used in sporting contests long before night games were played at Wrigley Field, but bright lights...
Spectroscopy Hunts Down Counterfeit Drugs Consumers are using the Internet to buy prescription drugs more cheaply, sometimes without a prescription, but they may get more than they bargained for because some unscrupulous retailers provide...
Inspection in the Fast Lane In a security-conscious age, there is a world of information to keep tabs on. Walk into an airport or a federal building, and you are screened for forbidden objects. If you run a small retail shop...
Helium: Up, Up and Away? Refiners are struggling to keep up with demand, prices have increased dramatically over the past few years, and debate is raging over depleting federal reserves. If you think the subject is oil,...
Tiny Eyes in the Sky The demands of military electro-optical systems designers who require the detection of very small infrared signals over a wide variety of applications are driving advances in the area of 2-D...
Brave New Virtual World: Second Life Avatar-inhabited online worlds such as Second Life (SL) could be the next new wave of the Internet. Science-related organizations and companies, along with a number of academic institutions, already...
Optical Thin-Film Coating Methods Chances are that this magazine comes off a press that uses components with thin-film coatings. What’s more, your supermarket checkout scanners, cell phones, cars and TVs all utilize thin-film...
Taking Solar to the Extreme When polar explorer Robert Swan – the first person to walk to both the North and South Poles – returned from his most recent expedition to Antarctica in March 2008, he brought back proof that solar...
Mining the Moon with Solar If NASA has its way, Solar energy and fiber optics will combine to power a high-temperature furnace that mines oxygen on the moon. A manned lunar base will require a substantial supply of oxygen,...
Concentrating the Sun Researchers worldwide are looking for the combination that will unlock the door to more efficient solar energy. A variety of approaches are being tested that, hopefully, will raise efficiencies to a...
In the Spirit of Managing the Planet Gathering satellite images of Earth is nothing new. Nor is using the information to analyze our continents, oceans and weather-related events for environmental, strategic and reconnaissance...
EDITORIAL
Change is Good Practically 40 years ago I would come home after school to see the colossal mess my mother had made of our dining room table. In hours, more paper than I ever fathomed grew into layers, shapes and towers of manuscripts, layouts, photographs, artwork and scribbled notes. When gravity eventually set in, my mother would review and work on the papers where they lay, on the floor. My mother, Teddi...
TECH PULSE
Give Me Some (Photonic) Skin BRUSSELS, Belgium – A unique sensor system that combines optoelectronics and fiber optics in a flexible, stretchable, skinlike polymer film for applications including health care and structural...
Nanowire Arrays Help Make Less Expensive Image Sensors Berkeley, Calif. – Cheap and disposable sensors for use almost anywhere could be within reach, thanks to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and from Lawrence Berkeley National...
NIWeek 2008: Many Cores and Going Green AUSTIN, Texas – It was nothing dramatic, just a guy jogging in place. But thanks to some technical wizardry, that image was superimposed over another in real time on a screen. So it looked as if Tim...
Rounding Out a New Way to Make an Artificial Eye CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A collaboration between researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has led to a novel technology that not only...
New global warming element TEMPE, Ariz. – Researchers at Arizona State University have found yet another culprit in the onslaught of global warming – and it’s called brown carbon. Taking brown carbon into account in global...
Fighting crime with mass spectrometry WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – It’s tough to live a life of crime these days. Burglar alarms are fancier, locks have gone biometric, and surveillance cameras get smaller and sneakier all the time. And now,...
Ice’s Secrets Hold Promise for Green Projects LIVERMORE, Calif. – In a development that could have an impact on two vital areas – water purification and fuel cell design – researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have imaged ice a few...
Fluorescent Windshield Improves Visibility WARREN, Mich. – Head-up automotive displays are often touted as a great safety feature because they minimize the driver’s need to glance down for information, which helps drivers to keep their eyes...
LIGHT SPEED
LCD Sales: Big Wave Coming Ashore Sales of thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD manufacturing equipment are expected to surge 58 percent to reach a value of $13 billion in 2008, according to the “Quarterly TFT LCD Supply/Demand and Capital...
The Road Leads Up for the LED Backlight Unit Market By 2012, the large-format LED backlight unit (BLU) market is expected to reach 182 million units – up from 18 million in 2008 – and to account for 27 percent of the overall backlight unit market, up...
Janos Acquired by Fluke Janos Technology of Keene, N.H., a manufacturer of custom precision optics, thermal imaging lenses and optical assemblies, was acquired recently by Fluke Corp. of Everett, Wash., a Danaher company....
DeltaNu Receives DoD Contract The DeltaNu business unit of Intevac Photonics of Santa Clara, Calif., has been awarded a $1.029 million contract by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to develop Raman spectroscopy systems for...
Andlinger Acquires VPT Vacuum Process Technology (VPT) of Plymouth, Mass. has been purchased by principals of Andlinger & Company Inc., a private investment and management firm, and Ralf Faber, who has become the...
nLight Acquires Interest in Optotools Vancouver, Wash.-based nLight Corp., a supplier of high-power semiconductor lasers and fibers, has acquired a majority interest in Optotools GmbH of Heilbronn, Germany, a supplier of semiconductor...
Edmund Optics to Celebrate Anniversary Edmund Optics Inc. of Barrington, N.J., is planning a celebration to mark the 15th anniversary of its local service in China. The company has offices in Shanghai and in Shenzhen. The celebration is...
Vitex and Novaled to Collaborate Vitex Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., which specializes in thin-film encapsulation, and Novaled AG of Dresden, Germany, a provider of organic LEDs, have announced a cooperative effort. They will...
Danaher Motion Joins MathWorks Danaher Motion of Santa Barbara, Calif., has become a member of the MathWorks Connections Program, which is available to third-party organizations that develop and distribute complementary...
LightWorks Optics Wins Lockheed Martin Contract A multimillion-dollar sales contract has been awarded to LightWorks Optics Inc. of Tustin, Calif., by Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., which specializes in aeronautics and space systems....
Bruker Closes S.I.S. Purchase Bruker AXS GmbH of Aachen, Germany, has closed on its acquisition of S.I.S. Surface Imaging Systems GmbH of Herzogenrath, also in Germany. The latter company, which develops, manufactures and...
Olympus, Digital Surf to Partner Olympus Life Science Europa GmbH of Hamburg, Germany, and Digital Surf sarl of Besançon, France, have signed an agreement. The German company will supply users of its Lext OLS3100 confocal laser...
License Signed by Konica, Universal Display Konica Minolta Holdings Inc. of Tokyo and Universal Display Corp. of Ewing, N.J., have signed a license agreement that enables the Japanese company to integrate its partner’s proprietary organic LED...
Point Grey Expands Its Headquarters Point Grey Research Inc., a developer of digital camera technology, has relocated its headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, to a facility in Richmond, near the Vancouver airport. The...
SemiConductor Devices Receives $1.75 Million Contract DARPA has awarded a Phase I contract worth $1.75 million to SemiConductor Devices of Haifa, Israel, for the development of an “XBn” infrared detector technology. The technology will consist of a...
Jenoptik Names American Distributor Jenoptik Laserdiode GmbH of Jena, Germany, has named RPMC Lasers Inc. of O’Fallon, Mo., as the distributor of its high-power diode lasers in North and South America. The American company said that...
Transmission Project to Begin in California The Optical Internetworking Forum in Fremont, Calif., has outlined the details for its 100-Gb long-distance dense wavelength division multiplexing transmission project. Dual-polarization quadrature...
Applied Energetics Receives Army Contract The US Army has awarded a follow-on contract to Applied Energetics Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., for the continued development of light filament sensor technology. The program is dedicated to developing a...
Octillion to Team with Oakland University Octillion Corp. of Auburn Hills, Mich., an alternative and renewable energy technology company, has entered into a sponsored research agreement with scientists at Oakland University in Rochester,...
NanoSight Opens California Office NanoSight Ltd. of Salisbury, UK, a provider of optical detection instruments, has announced the opening of an office in Costa Mesa, Calif., to provide sales, applications and service support in the...
GREENLIGHT
GM Tops It Off with Solar In Spain, companies are encouraged to host solar energy systems that produce electricity to be sold back to the utilities, where feed-in tariffs guarantee a set price for that energy. With that in...
MIT Brainstorms Alternative Energies There is no shortage of great minds at work on the energy crisis. In Cambridge, the MIT Energy Initiative was launched in the fall of 2006 after an announcement during President Susan Hockfield’s...
It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again The semiconductor industry knows a good thing when it sees it and is jumping on the solar bandwagon big time. Remember the mid-1980s and 1990s when Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM and National...
Solar Stats Currently, solar does not amount to much of the worldwide power generation. In fact, a recent report, “Photovoltaic Technology Trends,” from Displaybank Co. Ltd. of Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, pegs...
Can PV Plug the Supply Gap? To find out what’s happening on the materials side, I spoke with Tom Earnest, marketing manager for DuPont Photovoltaic Solutions in Wilmington, Del. He indicated that there appears to be no letup in...
LEDs Trip the Light Fantastic New York City’s department of design and construction recently entered the second phase of the City Lights Design Competition, an international contest to design new streetlights, sidewalks and parks...
SLICES FROM THE BREADBOARD
Gordon Gould’s Scientific “Patent” Method In 1957, Gordon Gould, an American physicist, was inarguably the first to coin the term “laser” and to write a complete explanation of its construction and application. If you haven’t heard of Gould before, you might imagine that the two feats would have earned him the title of inventor of the laser, but that’s where you’d be wrong. Gould’s effort to acquire a...
Patent Dispute Settled Veeco Instruments Inc. of Plainview, N.Y., a solutions manufacturer for customers in the high-brightness LED, solar, data storage, semiconductor, scientific research and industrial markets, has...
PD-LD Awarded Patent for VBG Improvement PD-LD Inc. of Pennington, N.J., a provider of custom volume Bragg grating (VBG) elements and VBG-stabilized lasers, has received a US patent for its latest VBG advancement. According to the company,...
Alloptic Receives Japanese Patent Livermore, Calif.-based Alloptic Inc., an RF-over-glass and passive optical networking (PON) solutions developer for CATV, telecom and private network operators worldwide, has received a patent from...
SpectraScience Patent Screens for Cancer A patent for correcting misalignment between at least two images in a sequence of images, resulting at least in part from tissue sample movement, has been issued to SpectraScience Inc. of San Diego,...
Teleoperated Robotic Sorting System (US RE40394) An automatic sorting system has been developed that allows humans to choose objects from a moving belt without being on-site. The operator uses a touch screen to select images of the mixture of...
Single Vision Sensor Object Detection System (US 7389171) A vehicular sensing system has been invented that includes a single vision sensor positioned to detect an object. A controller coupled to the sensor generates a safety system signal in response to...
Multiple-Wavelength TDMA Optical Network (US 7386236) An advanced, low-cost, high-bandwidth multiple access technology for passive optical networks (PON) has been created that provides a PON in which multiple wavelengths are used to increase overall...
Hologram Recording Medium (US 7385740) A hologram recording medium has been invented. It has a recording layer at which, when illuminated by writing light, a hologram is recorded. On top of the recording layer is a protective layer with a...
PROFILE
The Advocate Dr. Stamatia Destounis is a radiologist at Elizabeth Wende Breast Care LLC and an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester, both in Rochester, N.Y. She has worked with technology companies such as Siemens and Hologic Inc. and has earned the Reach to Recovery Award of Excellence from the American Cancer Society. Since the ACRIN trial in 2003 showed that digital mammography...
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
Match the Emitter to the Task Often a scientist or engineer is tasked with developing a spectroscopic system for which he must choose a source. He may know exactly which architecture, dispersive element, slit size and sensor the application requires, but he may be left to the mercy of marketing propaganda when it comes to the selection of the infrared source. Should he depend on the old reliable technology or venture into a...
LIGHTER SIDE
'Lazybrains': A real mental workout PHILADELPHIA – Parents who worry about video games turning their kids into mindless couch potatoes should consider Lazybrains, a game developed at Drexel University that is controlled by brain power. Jordan Santell, who graduated from Drexel’s digital media program in June, assembled his Lazybrains team in January, when it was time to start senior projects. He knew they couldn’t make just any...
PRODUCTS
PHOTOLITHOGRAPHY STEPPER Azores Corp. has announced its Model 8700 PanelPrinter system for flat panel display Gen 3.5 applications. The photolithography stepper is based on proprietary step-and-repeat technology and includes a low-distortion lens in a compact footprint that measures 3.4 × 2.9 m. The system can be configured with two lens options: the 18709i lens with a resolution of 2.5 μm and a depth of focus of 30...
Onto Innovation
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WIRE GRID POLARIZERS IR holographic wire grid polarizers have been introduced by Edmund Optics Inc. The holographic manufacturing technique creates submicron wire grid spacing of 2700 grooves per millimeter. Available in...
Edmund Optics Inc.
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COOLED CCD CAMERA Hamamatsu Corp.’s Orca-R2 cooled CCD camera includes an ER-150 progressive-scan interline CCD enclosed in a vacuum-sealed head. It has 1344 × 1024 pixels and performs simultaneous exposure and...
Hamamatsu Corporation
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UV LASER The Avia 355-28 has been added to Coherent Inc.’s family of micromachining lasers. It delivers 28 W of output at 355 nm at 110 kHz. Features include proprietary PosiLock technology for repeatable...
Coherent Inc.
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2-D ENCODERS To enable measurement of linear guiding and thermal drift errors during movement of a stage or machine, Heidenhain Corp. has unveiled the 1Dplus encoders. The 2-D encoders can be used in stacked...
Heidenhain Corporation
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EPOXY ADHESIVE Master Bond Inc. has introduced a low-viscosity epoxy adhesive for room-temperature-curing bonding applications that is fast. The adhesive EP41SMED has a 5:1 mix ratio by weight and a handling time...
Master Bond Inc.
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PARAMETER COMPARISON Carl Zeiss MicroImaging GmbH is offering a comparative diagram module for use in materials microscopy. It enables on-screen assessment of structural parameters of samples for materials scientists and...
Carl Zeiss Microscopy LLC
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LEDs Schott North America Inc. has introduced two LED products, both offering high-luminosity beams for web scanning and surface inspection. The surface-mount device has an acrylic cylindrical lens that...
SCHOTT North America Inc., Lighting & Imaging
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OPTICAL RECEIVER M2 Optics Inc. has introduced the FOS1000A 1000-MHz optical receiver to monitor and measure the modulation index of an optical carrier to optimize the performance of CATV, CCTV and other multichannel...
M2 Optics Inc.
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LASER SAFETY Lit laser safety signs in four standard prints have been announced by Laservision USA to alert personnel to potential laser hazards. Available are “Danger Class 3R,” “Danger Class 3B,” “Danger Class...
laservision USA
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SPECTROMETER The MagnaRay wavelength-dispersive x-ray spectrometer (WDS) introduced by Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. automatically combines energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) results with WDS operations using...
Thermo Fisher Scientific
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EMBEDDED SYSTEM National Instruments Corp. has announced its single-board reconfigurable I/O embedded system for intelligent stand-alone or networked operation. The device combines an integrated industrial...
National Instruments Corp.
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MOTION CONTROLLER ACS Motion Control Inc. has introduced the SPiiPlus and MC4U multiaxis motion controllers to provide subnanometer position resolution without compromising speed or throughput. Both controllers...
ACS Motion Control Inc.
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DICHROIC BEAMSPLITTERS A line of optical filters designed to efficiently combine or separate multiple laser beams has been launched by Semrock Inc. The LaserMux dichroic beamsplitters/combiners can multiplex 16 popular...
IDEX Health & Science - Semrock Optical Filters
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COMPACT X-RAY CAMERAS Princeton Instruments Inc. has announced that its PI-MTE cameras are now twice as fast, with 2-MHz readout and resolution of up to 4 megapixels. They are designed for coherent x-ray diffraction...
Teledyne Princeton Instruments
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PHOTONICS SPECTRA 2008
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