Photonics Handbook

Since its first successful operation in 1960 at Hughes Research Labs, the laser technology has been at the center of innovation and research. Semiconductor lasers first made their appearance in 1962...

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...

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...

Laser development for the microscopy market continues to be driven by key trends in applications, which currently include superresolution techniques, multiphoton applications in optogenetics and...

The digital camera represents an integration of optics, mechanics and electronics consisting of three layers (Figures 1a, b and c). The top and the middle layers are printed circuit boards (PCBs),...

All optical spectrometry techniques rely on the measurement of radiant power. The configuration of the instrument varies based on the measurement technique: absorption, emission, luminescence, or...

Illumination design has developed rapidly to include not only automotive headlamps and street lamps, but also backlit displays, fluorescent panel lighting, light-emitting diode or laser sources, and...

Charged-injection device imagers are metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) detectors that can be fabricated using PMOS, NMOS and CMOS integrated circuit technology, and may be configured as 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...

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...

Lenses come in a variety of shapes, sizes and materials. They can be made of a single piece of glass or have multiple elements; their surfaces can be spherical, aspheric or cylindrical; they can be...

In the beginning, automated inspection focused on the camera and optics, the algorithms, the interface hardware and the processor. Only rarely was attention paid to the lighting system or lighting...

Laser diodes vary widely in their wavelengths, powers, spectra and beam quality. Yet they share two fundamental components with all other lasers: an optical amplifier and a resonator that confines...

An indicator of how well the entire system performs is a measurement called bit-error-ratio (BER). Acceptable BERs range from one error per billion to one per trillion bits transmitted. It is rare...

There are three fundamentally different dispersive phenomena in optical fiber, of which polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is the most complex. In digital multimode fiber systems, a light pulse...