Photonics Handbook

Early fiber lasers were inefficient and limited to low powers, until more effective methods emerged to deliver the pump light into the cladding. Valentin Gapontsev, founder and CEO of IPG Photonics,...

Laser development for the microscopy market continues to be driven by key trends in applications, which currently include superresolution techniques, multiphoton applications in optogenetics and...

Over 60 years have passed since the first demonstration of a laser in 1960. After the initial spark of interest, lasers were for a while categorized as “a solution waiting for a problem,”...

Applications facilitated by tunable lasers fall into two categories: situations in which one or more discrete wavelengths are not available from any single- or multiline fixed-wavelength laser, or...

Optical coatings are deposited as thin-film multilayers of a variety of materials using specific deposition techniques. Coatings are applied to optical components that are intended for use at...

There are three fundamentally different dispersive phenomena in optical fiber, of which polarization mode dispersion (PMD) is the most complex. In digital multimode fiber systems, a light pulse...

Laser diodes vary widely in their wavelengths, powers, spectra and beam quality. Yet they share two fundamental components with all other lasers: an optical amplifier and a resonator that confines...