Photonics/​Optics

A document discusses a proposal to use axially stretched metal nanolaminate membranes as lightweight parabolic cylindrical reflectors in the Dual Anamorphic Reflector Telescope (DART) — a planned spaceborne telescope in which the cylindrical reflectors would be arranged to obtain a point...

A document discusses a broadband (white light) point source, located at the telescope Cassegrain focus, which generates a cone of light limited by the hole in the secondary mirror (SM). It propagates to the aspheric null-mirror, which is optimized to make all the reflected rays to be normal to the...

Multiparallel three-dimensional optical microscopy is a method of forming an approximate three-dimensional image of a microscope sample as a collection of images from different depths through the sample. The imaging apparatus includes a single microscope plus an assembly of beam splitters and...

For the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) Spectrum Calibration Development Unit (SCDU) testbed, wideband white light is used to simulate starlight. The white light source mount requires extremely stable pointing accuracy ( lights were coupled to a photonic crystal fiber (PCF).

A theoretical analysis has revealed that tapered optical waveguides could be useful as white-light whispering-gallerymode (WGM) optical resonators. The compactness and the fixed-narrow-frequency- band nature of the resonances of prior microdisk and microsphere WGM resonators are advantageous in...

To reject solar radiation photons at the front aperture for large telescopes, a mosaic of large transmission mode filters is placed in front of the telescope or at the aperture of the dome. Filtering options for effective rejection of sunlight include a smaller filter down-path near the focus of the...

Sensor signal processing is widely used on aircraft and spacecraft. The scheme employs multiple input/output nodes for data acquisition and CPU (central processing unit) nodes for data processing. To connect 110 nodes and CPU nodes, scalable interconnections such as backplanes are desired...

A film-growth process was developed for polycrystalline mercuric iodide that creates cost-effective, large-area detectors for high-energy charged-particle detection. A material, called a barrier film, is introduced onto the substrate before the normal mercuric iodide film growth...

The silicon substrate carrier was created so that a large-area array (in this case 62,000+ elements of a microshutter array) and a variety of discrete passive and active devices could be mounted on a single board, similar to a printed circuit board. However, the density and...

An inter-symbol guard time has been proposed as a means of synchronizing the symbol and slot clocks of an optical pulse-position modulation (PPM) receiver with the symbol and slot periods of an incoming optical PPM signal. (Such synchronization is necessary for correct identification of received...

Modal filters in the ≈10-μm spectral range have been implemented as planar dielectric waveguides in infrared interferometric applications such as searching for Earth-like planets. When looking for a small, dim object (“Earth”) in close proximity to a large, bright object (“Sun”), the...

A conceptual space telescope having an aperture tens of meters wide and a focal length of hundreds of meters would be implemented as a group of six separate optical modules flying in formation: a primary-membrane-mirror module, a relay-mirror module, a focal-plane-assembly module containing...

A method reduces sensitivity to noise in a signal from a laser heterodyne interferometer. The phase-locked loop (PLL) removes glitches that occur in a zero-crossing detector's output [that can happen if the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the heterodyne signal is low] by the use of an internal oscillator...