For many years, secondary sources were just a vision held by scientists. Eventually, their progress was driven by the goal to build a particle accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider in a laser lab at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN). The physics behind this vision are intriguing: An electron can be accelerated by a light pulse much faster, and much more energy efficient, than by an electromagnetic pulse in a regular particle accelerator. An urgent need from big

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) have garnered significant attention for various sensing and visualization applications during the past three decades. The sustained progress in their development during this period owes largely to...

Fusion energy has promised for decades to offer a clean, carbon-free, safe, and virtually limitless source to power the planet. Now that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists on Dec. 5, 2022, have achieved “net target...

Last fall, Samsung Electronics’ visual display business vice president, Tae-yong Son, described the company’s process for manufacturing micro-LED displays as “Trying to place a tiny object, smaller than a human hair, in a specific...

Multifield imaging is a new imaging technique that enables the simultaneous capture of multiple images under various lighting conditions. Coupled with time delay integration, this emerging imaging technique can overcome many of the limitations of...

For vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), the future looks bright — because their performance is rising while their price is falling. On the horizon is also a move from near-IR to shortwave IR wavelengths. These trends will help...

The development of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting has been a great success story of our times. LEDs are nearly ideal light sources that have largely replaced other lighting technologies, except in some niche applications. Solid-state lighting...

After years of investment and research, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are cheaper and brighter than ever before, and they consume less power. With reliability measured in thousands of hours, LEDs are proving to be cost-effective solutions in both...

Replacing smartphones with smart glasses isn’t practical … yet. In the meantime, advancements in photonics are helping to expand the use of smart glasses in educational, medical, military, and industrial settings. According to technologists and end...

The increasingly broad transi­tion from incandescent light bulbs to OLEDs for general lighting poses new challenges to light measurement. OLEDs exhibit completely different and far greater variations in their spectral distribution. This variability...

Fast and efficient delivery of product into the customer’s hands is the endgame in manufacturing. Any defect that occurs as products progress along the manufacturing line may be magnified, which can cause bottlenecks in production or require...

A considerable part of contemporary photonics research that investigates the interaction of light with nanoscale objects — nanophotonics — is motivated by the commercial potential of real-world devices. A vast number of experimental studies call for...

Legacy light sources such as halogen and metal halide produce highly collimated directional beams, but with short life and lower efficiency than LED sources. LEDs are highly efficient and long lasting, but are poor at creating beam angles below 10...

The first advances in color displays date to the mid ’50s with the development of the cathode ray tube1, the primary display technology until liquid crystal displays (LCDs) emerged a decade ago. For a brief period, plasma technology showed...

There is a lot of interest these days in the physiological effect of light on the human body. Variously referred to as human-centric lighting, biological lighting, or circadian lighting, all reflect the emerging understanding that light can have a...

The concentrated solar market is often overshadowed by photovoltaic (PV) panels, yet the market segment is expected to grow by nearly 20 percent annually through 2020. Concentrated solar power — or CSP — has unique performance advantages...

Low-temperature polycrystalline silicon is increasingly used as the thin-film transistor material on the glass backplanes of high-performance displays, particularly for smartphones. These thin films are fabricated on large glass panels that then are...

The use of quantum dots in combination with LEDs shows huge potential benefits for the lighting industry. The versatility and tunability of quantum dots can offer solutions when optimizing luminaire design for peak performance.

For some applications, the defining attributes of traditional lasers — high spatial and temporal coherence — can have an adverse effect. High spatial coherence introduces artifacts such as speckle in imaging, which degrades the image. As...

Display manufacturers are constantly striving to satisfy consumers’ never-ending appetites for better and more true-to-life electronic displays. Accomplishing that has as much to do with color as it does with resolution. To do so, one...

Mobile personal electronics and wearables have become immensely popular around the globe, and this has given rise to a new dilemma. Screen content has grown, mainly from multimedia applications, resulting in increased display pixel count. The...