Monterey Park, CA--Kotura, a provider of silicon photonics products, has demonstrated an optical communications modulator with 2 V peak-to-peak driving voltage that allows the use of inexpensive CMOS drivers and further enables the development of silicon photonics circuits for integrated optical interconnects.

Livermore, CA--Scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are developing the electronics for a third-generation artificial retina as part of the U.S. DOE project to produce an “epiretinal prosthesis” that could restore vision to millions of people around the world suffering from eye diseases.

Chemists at the University of Toronto and the University of New South Wales have observed quantum mechanics at work in photosynthesis in marine algae.

Lumerical Solutions (Vancouver, BC, Canada) has donated ten licenses for its nanophotonics simulation software to one of the largest grid computing sites in the United Kingdom.

February 3, 2010--The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST's) five-layer sunshield has passed its critical design review, meaning that its design is complete and meets mission requirements.

February 3, 2010--Fraunhofer IPMS (Dresden, Germany) has achieved "first light" with its digital VGA full-color organic LED (OLED) microdisplay--a milestone for the European "HYPOLED" project.

February 2, 2010--The NNSA announced that scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL have successfully delivered an historic level of laser energy--more than 1 megajoule--to a target in a few billionths of a second and demonstrated the target drive conditions required to achieve fusion ignition.

February 2, 2010--On January 27 during the Photonics West conference, Apple held a press release outside The Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA announcing the Apple iPad, an interactive display that Apple calls a revolutionary device. But during the press release, picketers from defectivebydesign.org were handing out small brochures describing “the restrictions that Apple imposes on the user.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).