Photonics Handbook

Developed in the early 1990s, the silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) is a solid-state photodetector whose sensitivity to light rivals that of a photomultiplier tube (PMT) in a regime where a few hundred...

Superresolution optical microscopy, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded to Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell, and William Moerner in 2014, has been one of the most momentous developments in the life...

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...

Light is a versatile tool for investigating physical and chemical processes in nature. Any specific system being analyzed may, through the light it emits or reflects, communicate information about...

Laser development for the microscopy market continues to be driven by key trends in applications, which currently include superresolution techniques, multiphoton applications in optogenetics and...

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...

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,”...

For rotationally symmetric optical systems, either the lens or the detector moves along the optical axis to maintain optical performance. If the compensating axial motion is accomplished without the...

One of the most critical elements of any time-resolved spectroscopy and dynamics experiment is the optical delay line. A typical optical delay line consists of a retroreflector or folding mirrors on...

Abbe Error — Linear off-axis errors introduced by angular deviations coupled to a moment arm at the point of interest on stage mounted devices (θ in Figure 1). The effect of Abbe error...

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...

An optical time-domain reflectometer sends short pulses of light into a fiber and measures its reflections as a function of time. The delay of these reflections to the detector as well as their...

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...

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...

Some efforts in global optimization research for optical design center around probabilistic methods such as global search. While promising for small problems with few variables, these methods...

Many linear materials proceseqsing applications call for lasers with continuous-wave (CW) output. For example, early stereolithography systems were based on CW lasers such as argon-ion or HeCd. To...

There are three fundamentally different dispersive phenomena in optical fiber, of which polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is the most complex. In digital multimode fiber systems, a light pulse...

As bit rates increase to meet expanding demand, systems have become increasingly sensitive to polarization-related impairments. These include polarization mode dispersion (PMD) in optical fibers,...