Photonics Handbook

Optical fibers are made from either glass or plastic. Most are roughly the diameter of a human hair, and they may be many miles long. Light is transmitted along the center of the fiber from one end...

A bench power supply should be thoroughly tested and characterized before it is used to power a laser. The quality of the controls and safety measures incorporated into a bench supply will need to be...

In general, there are three common approaches to reducing mechanical excitation of photonic systems. The first is identifying the sources of vibration and implementing ways to eliminate or reduce...

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...

Ultraprecision machining can be defined in general terms as the removal of material from a substrate utilizing a machine tool that operates at a resolution of 10 nm (0.4 μin.) or less. The...

Photonic components are key elements for the information technology (IT). Photonics technology covers the generation of information (cameras, sensors), its transportation (optical communication),...

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...

Conditions on the factory floor and in industrial cleanrooms with high-capacity air filtration systems can hamper the use of interferometry. Another problem is the testing of large-aperture mirrors...

In the search for ever-higher pixel counts for the digital still camera, it is clear that, if chip size remains constant, then “more pixels” means “smaller pixels.” The...