Photonics Dictionary

Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) is a technique used in laser physics to amplify ultrashort laser pulses to high energies without causing damage to the amplifying medium. The method was first...

Double-clad fiber (DCF) is a specialized optical fiber that features two concentric cladding layers surrounding a core. The design of double-clad fibers allows them to be used in various...

An optical fiber that can be used to amplify an optical input. Erbium rare earth ions are added to the fiber core material as a dopant in typical levels of a few hundred parts per million. The fiber...

A fiber laser is a type of laser in which the active gain medium is an optical fiber doped with rare-earth ions such as erbium, ytterbium, or neodymium. Fiber lasers generate coherent light through...

Gallium nitride (GaN) is a compound made up of gallium (Ga) and nitrogen (N). It is a wide-bandgap semiconductor material that exhibits unique electrical and optical properties. Gallium nitride is...

Harmonic generation refers to a nonlinear optical process in which incoming photons interact with a material and produce new photons at integer multiples of the frequency of the incoming photons....

In semiconductor physics and materials science, the term "III-V materials" refers to compounds composed of elements from group III and group V of the periodic table. More specifically, these...

The Kerr effect, named after the physicist John Kerr who first observed it in 1875, is a nonlinear optical phenomenon where the refractive index of a material changes in response to an applied...

Optoelectronics is a branch of electronics that focuses on the study and application of devices and systems that use light and its interactions with different materials. The term "optoelectronics" is...

A device using a parametric amplifier inside a resonant optical cavity to generate a frequency-tunable coherent beam of light from an intense laser beam of fixed frequency. This device is tuned by...

Rare earth dopants refer to elements from the lanthanide series, also known as rare earth elements, that are intentionally introduced into the crystal lattice of a material to modify its properties....