Photonics/​Optics

Optics

Advanced optics technologies are essential to design engineers developing systems in manufacturing. Here are the latest technical briefs, products, and applications for design engineers working with optics technology.

Stories

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Products: Imaging
Deposition Sciences, Santa Rosa, CA, offers long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) bandpass filters with operation at temperatures between ambient and 10 K. A variety of substrates is available, including germanium, silicon, zinc...
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Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Nanolaminate Membranes as Cylindrical Telescope Reflectors
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...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Large Telescope Segmented Primary Mirror Alignment
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...
Articles: Photonics/Optics
In a perfect imaging system, light exists as a spherical wave that converges to form a point image. However, in practice wavefront aberrations act to perturb the wavefront from its ideal...
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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Fiber reinforced polymer composites are revolutionizing the design of large, high-performance structures in the aerospace, marine and power generation industries due to their...
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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Fiber reinforced polymer composites are revolutionizing the design of large, high-performance structures in the aerospace, marine and power generation industries due to their...
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Techs for License: Photonics/Optics
Flat-Plate Lens Achieves Negative Refraction at 100-nm Resolution
AIST Innovations Experiments with holograms have led to a thin-film flat-plate lens that has a periodic (layered) structure and that is capable of a resolution of 100 nm or finer. The flat lens provides excellent image-forming characteristics by the incidence of light having a...
Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
The TDM-to-packet network transformation has been underway in transport/ telecommunications networks for some years now, fueled primarily by two trends: (a) the advent of triple-play (voice, video, data)...
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Products: Photonics/Optics
Deposition Sciences (Santa Rosa, CA) has developed optical thin film coatings to be deposited on materials such as Ultem®, Zeonex®, and a variety of polycarbonate plastics. These rugged coatings operate from the...
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Articles: Imaging
Dr. Greg Olsen has had an illustrious career as a research scientist and entrepreneur. With degrees in physics and materials science, Olsen founded EPITAXX, a fiber-optic...
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Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Mercuric Iodide Anticoincidence Shield for Gamma-Ray Spectrometer
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...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Rectangular-waveguide inserts that are made of non-ferromagnetic metals and are sized and shaped to function as notch filters have been conceived as reference standards for use in the...
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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Canted-Coil™ springs Bal Seal Engineering Foothill Ranch, CA 949-460-2100 www.balseal.com When astronauts embarked on the latest mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, Bal Seal Engineering’s...
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Application Briefs: Energy
Diverse types of lasers, such as nanosecond, pulsed, and excimer, have been considered for various applications in the photovoltaic industry, including edge isolation, edge deletion, drilling for back...
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Briefs: Imaging
Silicon Wafer-Scale Substrate for Microshutters and Detector Arrays
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...
Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
C-mount Xenoplan and Cinegon lenses Schneider Optics Van Nuys, CA 818-766-3715www.schneideroptics.com Schneider Optics’ C-mount Xenoplan and Cinegon lenses were selected by NASA to...
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Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Assembly Machines Produce Optics for NASA’s NuSTAR Telescope
Cylindrical optics module assembly machines ABTech Swanzey, NH 603-358-6431 www.abtechmfg.com ABTech has completed the first of two cylindrical optics module assembly machines for Columbia University’s Nevis Astrophysics Laboratory. The multi-axis air bearing machine platforms are...
Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Ultrashort pulse (USP), or “ultrafast,” lasers emit extremely brief pulses of light, generally with duration of a picosecond (10-12 seconds) or less. The pulses...
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Application Briefs: Robotics, Automation & Control
When a leading manufacturer of CNC optical manufacturing technology needed ultra-accurate and stable positioning for a new system to measure conformal optics, it turned to...
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Briefs: Photonics/Optics
A proposed metrology system would be incorporated into a proposed telescope that would include focusing optics on a rigid bench connected via a deployable mast to another rigid bench...
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Briefs: Imaging
An established method of room-temperature interferometric null testing of mirrors having simple shapes (e.g., flat, spherical, or spheroidal) has been augmented to enable measurement of...
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Blog: Photonics/Optics
Icecube Telescope
Physicists, engineers, and technicians from the University of Delaware's Bartol Research Institute are part of an international team working to build the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice. Neutrinos have no electrical charge and can travel millions of miles through space. Dubbed "IceCube," the telescope will...
Blog: Imaging
Remote Key Duplication
University of California at San Diego computer scientists have designed a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key, instead relying on a photograph of the key.
Products: Photonics/Optics
Deposition Sciences, Inc. (DSI) (Santa Rosa, CA) offers transparent conductive coatings for use in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) spectral ranges. The transparent coatings are compatible with DSI’s...
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Blog: Photonics/Optics
Cosmic Lens
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and their colleagues have been able to observe a young star-forming galaxy as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang and determine how the galaxy may eventually evolve to become a system like our own Milky Way. The team made their observations by coupling two...
Blog: Photonics/Optics
Chemical Weapon Detecting Compound
A light-transmitting compound called (A)ZrPSe 6, where A can be potassium, rubidium, or cesium, has a difficult chemical structure that does not crystallize well. Scientists from the Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University were able to determine the structure of the compound using the uniquely...
Application Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Prisms are used in countless optical systems — from the pair of binoculars in your closet to cutting edge targeting systems to retroreflectors on the Moon. In modern, high-end optical systems,...
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Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Multichannel Monitor-Stabilizer for Injection-Locked Lasers
Temp Tracker and Temp Tracker 12 ch (single-channel and 12-channel versions) programs are designed for use with an atomic gravity gradiometer. They support the stable operation of the injection-locked slave laser(s) in an autonomous regime. Due to changes of environmental conditions and...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Solar-thermal-radiation concentrators in the form of transmissive diffractive optical elements (DOEs) have been proposed as alternatives to mirror- type solar concentrators now in...
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