Photonics Dictionary: D

A lightproof box used for storing photosensitive materials.

A room that is light-tight, permitting total darkness or illumination with a safelight when working with photosensitive materials.

A concave surface that has too much negative power; i.e., its radius of curvature is too short. This condition can be corrected if material is removed from the center section of the polisher.

Deep ultraviolet (DUV or deep-UV) refers to a specific range of ultraviolet light with shorter wavelengths than those in the UV-A and UV-B regions. The exact wavelength range considered as DUV can...

Description of a material, such as a water-soluble salt, that will continue absorbing moisture from the surrounding atmosphere until it dissolves into a liquid.

1. An instrument used to measure the opacity or density of dyes, pigments or dispersed particles that form an image in or on a medium, such as a photographic film. 2. A device used to measure the...

The region at the PN junction in a semiconductor radiation detector where the potential energies of the two materials create an energy barrier, which results in an electrical field that depletes the...

The ray refracted by a sphere of transparent material that travels back as closely as possible to the original path formed by the incident ray.

A detector array refers to a collection of individual detector elements arranged in a two-dimensional grid or matrix format. Each element within the array is capable of detecting electromagnetic...

Dewetting is a phenomenon in materials science and physics where a thin film or coating spontaneously undergoes a process of breaking up and forming isolated droplets on a substrate. This occurs due...

Diamond turning, also known as diamond machining or diamond cutting, is a precision machining process used to produce high-quality optical surfaces and components with extremely tight tolerances. It...

Diamond turning refers to a precision machining process used to produce complex optical components, particularly lenses and mirrors, from materials such as metals, plastics, and crystalline materials...

A dichroic mirror, also known as a dichroic beamsplitter or interference filter beamsplitter, is an optical device that selectively reflects or transmits light based on its wavelength. Dichroic...

A polarizer that consists of dichroic polarizing material embedded in a plastic sheet, and that transmits light that is almost completely plane polarized with an intensity that is half that of the...

Dichroism refers to the property of certain materials to exhibit different colors or absorbance of light depending on the direction of light propagation or polarization. The term is commonly used in...

Glass tinted with mixed oxides of neodymium and praseodymium that, unlike most solid materials, have absorption bands that are very narrow and that have very sharp areas.

Die bonding is a critical process in semiconductor manufacturing and microelectronics assembly, where a semiconductor die or chip is attached and electrically connected to a substrate or a package....

Exhibiting the characteristic of materials that are electrical insulators or in which an electric field can be sustained with a minimum dispersion of power. They exhibit nonlinear properties, such as...

A waveguide made up of a dielectric material, such as plastic or mica, in a cylindrical form, through which the waves travel.

A lens made up of a dielectric material that is capable of influencing radio waves much in the same way an optical lens influences light.

Differential interference contrast (DIC) microscopy, also known as Nomarski interference contrast microscopy, is an optical imaging technique used in microscopy to enhance the contrast of transparent...

Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) is a nondestructive analytical technique used to investigate the optical properties of materials, particularly in the field of spectroscopy. Unlike traditional...

An optical diffuser is an optical component or material designed to scatter or diffuse light that passes through it. It is used to create a more even or uniform illumination, reduce glare, or soften...

An embossed or marked disk, constructed out of a transparent material and used with a camera system to soften an image.

A diode laser is a type of laser that uses a semiconductor diode as the active medium to generate coherent light. Semiconductor diodes are electronic devices that conduct electricity primarily in one...

A diode-pumped solid-state laser (DPSSL) is a type of laser system that uses semiconductor diode lasers to pump energy into a solid gain medium, resulting in the generation of coherent light. This...

Dispersion refers to the phenomenon where different wavelengths (colors) of light travel at different speeds when passing through a medium. This variation in the speed of light for different colors...

Operation in which the dispersion of a pulse limits the distance between repeaters in optical systems. Waveguide and material dispersion can make recognition of a pulse impossible.

A measure of the dispersive properties of a glass. The relative dispersion is defined as: where C, D, and F refer to the material's index of refraction at the three chief Fraunhofer lines in the...

A distributed feedback laser (DFB laser) is a type of semiconductor laser diode designed to emit coherent, narrow-bandwidth light with precise control over the wavelength. It achieves this through a...

An impurity in a material that is capable of inducing electrical conduction in that material by transferring an electron to the conduction band.

In the context of materials science and semiconductor physics, doping refers to the intentional introduction of impurities into a semiconductor material in order to alter its electrical properties....

A system for fabricating optical fiber, consisting of a furnace that heats the materials, a polymer coating stage, a capstan-pulling apparatus that free-draws the preform into a fiber and a drum on...

An image-processing device that scans in a straight line parallel to the axis of a rotating cylinder to which the material to be recorded is affixed.

A material's ability to undergo plastic deformation, specifically elongation, without fracturing.