Optics

These advances are useful for transportation, infrastructure, and aerospace.

This thin film can be used for ground-based and airborne applications in aircraft, balloons, and other flight missions.

Isolators used to control semiconductor manufacturing keep the James Webb Space Telescope steady.

This technology is a novel, rugged, and economic diagnostic and sensor platform technology.

Radar technologies were originally designed to identify and track airborne military targets. Today, they're more often used to detect motor vehicles, weather formations,...

Current laser interferometry pressure pulse detection techniques use the shock-induced change in index of refraction to track detonation and/or shock fronts in a single fiber optic by reflecting laser...

This approach removes the limitation on peak power densities that exists for fiber lasers.

This optical switch controls the direction of light passing through optical fibers faster and more efficiently.

Products include an aerosol scattering sensor; metal foam; and a new coated drug capsule.

The method could impact optical imaging, vision correction, and disease diagnosis.

These polymers can combine thermal and optically fixable shape memory.

This innovation dynamically provides fast signal processing and precision measurement.

A new instrument mounted on a telescope in Arizona aimed its robotic array of 5,000 fiber-optic “eyes” at the night sky on Oct. 22 to capture the first images showing...

Contact lenses that can monitor the wearer’s health and correct eyesight use embedded electronics. These, and other curved devices such as solar cells and electronics, could be...

Learn about the Draper Multi-Environment Navigator.

Engineers at the University of Illinois have found a way to redirect misfit light waves to reduce energy loss during optical data transmission. In a study,...

Machine vision systems shed light on processes too small or too fast to see with the human eye.

Laser illumination is scaling in a new direction.

Researchers have developed a new self-calibrating endoscope that produces 3D images of objects smaller than a single cell without a lens or any optical, electrical, or...

High quality camera performance on mobile devices has proven to be one of the features that most end-users aim for. The importance of optical image quality improvement and the trend to have thinner and thinner...

A new imaging method extracts a color image from a single exposure of light scattered through a mostly opaque material.

UCLA engineers have made major improvements on their design of an optical neural network — a device inspired by how the human brain works — that can identify objects or process...

Most of us know optical lenses as curved, transparent pieces of plastic or glass, designed to focus light for microscopes, spectacles, cameras, and more. For the most part, a...