Photonics Handbook

Electrical engineers are very familiar with the effects of shot noise, thermal noise, flicker noise and crosstalk, and recognize how these effects can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in their...

Materials processing with lasers is actually a broad term for a diverse range of applications. The major categories of these uses, and the lasers that service them, are summarized Table 1. At one...

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...

When purchasing an industrial laser system, the astute buyer will look for a Class 1 laser product — a system where the laser beam hazard is completely enclosed and there is no potential laser...

In their earliest forms, UV bandpass filters that were optimized for wavelengths less than 400 nm, such as the Schott UG or the Hoya U-series, were constructed of absorbing compounds in glass. Such...

Neodymium-doped crystals and glasses such as Nd:YAG (neodymium:yttrium aluminum garnet) have long been used as laser gain materials. Optically pumped, they produce an output wavelength close to 1...

Over 60 years have passed since the first demonstration of a laser in 1960. After the initial spark of interest, lasers were for a while categorized as “a solution waiting for a problem,”...

What are thin-film coatings? The purpose of any optical thin-film coating is to modify the transmittance and reflectance properties of the substrate material to which they are applied. Most coatings...

The optical materials selected for an optical system depend upon the application, the required system performance and the environment in which the system is to perform; thus the materials’...

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...

An optical coating engineer is frequently confronted with a difficult specification for a coating. Often the difficulty in the specification results from the particular form of the optical system. If...

Images are produced by many means: cameras, x-ray machines, electron microscopes, radar and ultrasound. They are used in the entertainment, medical, scientific and business industries; for security...

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

The common polycrystalline materials used for optical thin-film materials do not satisfy the requirements of telecommunications because of the instabilities caused by moisture absorption in their...

Infrared system design is not, like some circuit design, a synthetic process. One cannot start by stating the problem and proceeding in an orderly fashion to a final solution. Rather, we guess a...

To the novice or casual user of optics, the acquisition of an optical system can be a very difficult experience. Failure to understand the ground rules can result in unnecessarily high cost, late...

Reading and writing systems for polygonal scanners differ in the use of the scanner. However, many performance characteristics are similar for both. In writing applications, a light source, usually a...

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...

The use and importance of colorimetry has grown in unison with the increase of global manufacturing and processing. When plastic automotive trim produced on one continent must match a painted metal...

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...