Contact-free thickness measurements are increasingly important in industrial process monitoring and quality control. In the automotive and aviation industries, the exact thickness of paint and coating layers not only affects the overall appearance but also the level of protection against UV radiation and corrosion. In pharmaceuticals, the coating thickness governs the release of the drug within the human body, affecting a drug’s efficacy and potential side effects. Within the...

While electronics are perfect for performing fast calculations, photonics are ideal for moving information around. A major drawback of the latter, however, is the slow and costly development process for new photonic integrated chips, hampering their...

Applications ranging from astronomy to the life sciences to semiconductor manufacturing and metrology have steadily increased the demand for camera technologies targeting the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) and even the soft x-ray regimes. Many of these...

Free-space optics (FSO) and systems are uniquely valuable in enabling fast and secure connectivity, both in terrestrial and nonterrestrial networks. With major advancements in space optics over the last 20 years, ultrahigh-bandwidth signals now...

Imaging in the shortwave infrared (SWIR) range, from 1000 to 2500 nm, offers significant new advantages in an array of applications, from autonomous vehicles to food quality inspection. SWIR photons are scattered less by dust or fog than...

Due to the strong association that photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have with the data and telecom markets, it is easy to overlook their potential in other verticals — such as health care, agriculture and food production, and automotive...

Lasers provide many different industries with greater efficiency, less waste, and higher precision, but they are not always as easy to fix as the machines they replace. A blunted drill bit is easier to observe and replace than an underperforming...

As a second quantum revolution begins, many mysteries remain in the quantum realm. Perhaps this is unsurprising given the notoriously confounding properties of this new frontier. However, as time passes, it seems increasingly likely that the...

Welding is an ancient technology. Five thousand years ago, Egyptians used it to join copper water pipes together. Over the centuries it evolved into an essential technology to fuse various types of metals as experienced welders learned to optimize...

The biomedical community recognized the advantages of optical fibers long ago, accepting them even before their adoption for long-haul telecommunications. Early research on the light-guiding properties of fibers in the late 1920s was aimed at...

When the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Herschel Space Observatory revealed that the universe was far richer in star-forming dust than previously thought, the engineers who were developing a new mid-infrared space instrument recognized...

As their name implies, single-photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) detect single particles of light, and they do so with picosecond precision. Single-pixel SPADs have found wide use in astronomy, flow cytometry, fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy...

Sensor manufacturers have continuously sought to increase the resolution and performance of their products by decreasing the size of pixels while increasing their number. However, some applications require the scale and unique architecture of...

While CMOS imagers have evolved significantly since the 1960s, photon-counting sensitivity has still required the use of specialized sensors that often come with detrimental drawbacks. This changed recently with the emergence of new quanta image...

The space industry has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Once the domain of big-budget government projects, the field has increasingly seen the entry of more and more commercial enterprises, ranging from high-profile,...

In October 2021, a 40-year-old undersea pipeline off the coast of California ruptured, releasing more than 130,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean. The spill polluted the ecosystem, stifled local economic activities such as fishing and...

Real-time precision gas analysis is critical to a wide range of industries, including medical diagnostics, emissions monitoring, and semiconductor fabrication. The relatively simple molecular structure of most gases makes them ideal candidates for...

The dream of fully autono­mous, driverless cars remains just that for now — a vision of a future that will require considerable effort from engineers and programmers to realize. But other, subtler forms of automation are already entering the...

Imaging sensors reveal key details during the exploration of many areas of science, from untangling events at the quantum level and the fundamental processes of the cell to building our understanding of the wider cosmos. Imaging sensor technologies...

Adaptive optics (AO) technology enables Earth-based telescopes to take the twinkle out of the stars. The technology also helps in detecting and reversing eye disease, it improves the throughput of laser-driven manufacturing, and it has enabled the...

The worldwide sensor market is growing rapidly with the establishment and growth of new applications, such as medical devices that leverage noninvasive optical sensors, and environmental monitoring, which is gaining importance due to a rise in the...

As the Apollo 11 astronauts were initiating the first human-crewed landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong looked out of the module’s small window and, rather than observing a relatively flat landing zone on the lunar surface, he saw a boulder...

Originally developed for applications in defense, infrared scanning technology targeting the shortwave infrared (SWIR) band has become more widely adopted in many other applications over the last decade. From predicting water stress or detecting...

While it may seem intuitive that turning up the power on a laser will produce faster results in a materials processing operation, beam measurement tools often reveal that this only distributes the laser’s energy over a larger area, resulting...

If the old maxim “you are what you eat” has any truth to it, then it becomes critically important to ensure that the food you consume is safe and of suitable quality. To this end, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) spent $1.1 billion in 2019...