Photonics Dictionary: W

A system used for gratings that consists of a concave mirror, a grating and a plate holder mounted normal to the grating to reduce astigmatism and spherical aberration. The mounting yields a...

Any type of interference produced by a beamsplitter.

An extremely wide emission spectrum generated by the nonlinear effects created when a high peak power from a short-pulse laser is focused into a water or carbon tetrachloride cell. The resulting...

Term for the brightness of an oscilloscope trace.

In the context of electronics and semiconductor manufacturing, a wafer refers to a thin, flat disk or substrate made of a semiconducting material, usually crystalline silicon. Wafers serve as the...

A standard of luminous intensity evaluated as the luminous intensity of 1 cm2 of a blackbody at the melting point of platinum.

The continuous group of waves that persists for a short time only.

A wavefront refers to the continuous surface or boundary representing points in a wave that are in phase, meaning they have the same phase or position in their respective cycles. In simpler terms,...

A waveguide is a physical structure or device that is designed to confine and guide electromagnetic waves, such as radio waves, microwaves, or light waves. It is commonly used in communication...

A beamsplitting mirror that reflects as a function of wavelength.

A photofluorescent compound that, when used with a scintillating substance, absorbs photons and emits related photons having a greater wavelength. In this way a phototube or photocell may employ the...

The law stating that the just-perceptible increment of stimulus is a constant fraction of the stimulus.

A diffraction pattern sampling unit composed of a 32-element monolithic silicon photodiode array and a readout unit. The intensity on each detector element can be separately read out by means of a...

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 well plate, also known as a microplate or microtiter plate, is a flat plate with multiple small wells or depressions arranged in a grid pattern. Each well serves as a separate container for holding...

Whispering gallery mode (WGM) refers to a phenomenon in wave physics, particularly in optics, where waves, such as light or sound waves, are trapped and circulate along the periphery of a curved...

A feature of some imaging devices, such as digital cameras, that allows them to compensate for different lighting conditions by adjusting the color balance based on the difference between a white...

The random noise having a spectral density that is substantially independent of the frequency over a specified frequency range. White noise is widely used in the random vibration testing of devices.

The theorem stating that, when the sampling period in a recorded sample hologram is matched to the object spectrum, the resulting image does not suffer any loss of information content.

Whole slide imaging (WSI), also known as virtual slide microscopy or digital pathology, is a technology that involves the digitalization of entire glass slides containing histological or cytological...

A wide-angle lens is a type of camera lens that has a shorter focal length than a standard or normal lens, allowing it to capture a broader field of view. Wide-angle lenses are characterized by their...

Wide-field fluorescence microscopy uses either naturally occurring structures or staining with fluorescent tags that are activated by specific wavelengths of light and then emits a different...

After putting a thick photographic emulsion on a front-faced mirror, and exposing the emulsion to monochromatic incident light normal to the face, Wiener discovered, upon developing the emulsion,...

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...