Photonics/​Optics

University of Illinois researchers have a new low-cost method to carve delicate features onto semiconductor wafers using light – and watch as it happens. The team’s new technique can monitor a semiconductor’s surface as it is etched, in real time, with nanometer resolution. It uses...

Applied physicists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created an ultrathin, flat lens that focuses light without imparting the distortions of conventional lenses. At 60 nanometers thick, the flat lens is essentially two-dimensional, yet its focusing power...

PML researchers have devised a novel source of portable sunlight that may fill an urgent need in renewable energy research – namely, light sources that generate a near-perfect solar spectrum to be used in testing the performance and efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) materials.The team’s...

The key advantages of this approach include the fact that the index of interface glass (such as Pb glass n = 1.66) greatly reduces Fresnel losses at the fiber-to-waveguide interface, resulting in lower optical losses. A contiguous structure cannot be misaligned and readily...

The General MACOS Interface (GMI) for Modeling and Analysis for Controlled Optical Systems (MACOS) enables the use of MATLAB as a front-end for JPL’s critical optical modeling package, MACOS. MACOS is JPL’s in-house optical modeling software, which has proven to be...

The objective of this work was to develop a new class of readout integrated circuit (ROIC) arrays to be operated with Geiger avalanche photodiode (GPD) arrays, by integrating multiple functions at the pixel level (smart-pixel or active pixel technology) in 250-nm CMOS...