Performance breakthroughs and ease of use lead to commercial availability of multiwatt mid-wave infrared lasers.

Concentrating photovoltaic systems use lower-cost optics to reduce the use of high-cost semiconductor material.

Microstructured optical fibers can be made with polymer processing techniques, opening up new areas of sensing.

The advent of lasers as fluorescence light sources imposes new constraints and demands on the optical filters required for optimal operation of these laser-based imaging systems.

Several techniques—including aperture-based methods and two-dimensional detector-array profilers—can provide detailed beam measurements to optimize system performance in a variety of situations.

Although photonic crystals (PCs) are inherently intricate, they can result in optical devices of great simplicity.

While UV light can reduce the spread of tuberculosis (see http://bit.ly/5Oct5x), UV radiation unfortunately targets both nucleic acids and proteins, killing both the viral particles and healthy mammalian cells.

Light can serve as a probe of material structure, sometimes as a result of nonlinear effects.

In computer-to-plate lithographic printing (which still dominates ink-jet methods for high quality), an aluminum plate is coated with a chemical resist in which an image is lithographically applied.

To date, dye and Ti:sapphire laser oscillators working in concert with chirped-pulse amplifiers, hollow fibers, and broadband optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) have produced very short pulses between 2.6 and 7.8 fs at a variety of wavelengths; however, each of these pulses contains fewer than 2.0 and more than 1.3 cycles of the electromagnetic field.

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a new radial-polarization interferometer (RPI) that is able to measure smaller phase changes than a conventional Michelson interferometer.

With decades of development resulting in long life and beautiful, high-resolution imaging, the backlit liquid-crystal display (LCD) has the ruling position in the laptop-computer market, and dominates the television market as well.

Guiding atoms, and keeping them away from the walls of the conduit while doing so, is essential in many physics experiments; it also allows quantities of free atoms to be used to produce valuable effects such as slow light.

In a collaborative effort between researchers at Philips Research Laboratories (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), the Fraunhofer Institute for Material and Beam Technology (IWS; Dresden, Germany), Lambda Research Optics Europe (Eke, Belgium), and ASML (Veldhoven, The Netherlands), an extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) multilayer mirror has been developed with near-zero IR reflectance at the critical CO₂ laser wavelength of 10.6 µm—the wavelength used to produce an EUV-emitting plasma that serves as the light source for EUV lithography applications.

A train of femtosecond pulses with an average power of nearly a kilowatt emitted from a fiber is now a reality, thanks to a femtosecond-fiber chirped-pulse-amplification (CPA) system created by researchers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Jena, Germany), NKT Photonics (Birkeroed, Denmark), JT Optical Engine (Jena, Germany), and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering (Jena, Germany).

Compact and robust laser sources capable of long-range atmospheric propagation are needed for applications ranging from free-space optical communication to directed energy.

Femtosecond fiber lasers can give you almost anything you want, from ultraprecise machining and femtosecond frequency combs to pulses spanning only a single cycle of light.