Features | Photonics Spectra

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Features

Some recent ’breakthroughs’ look a lot like some old technology that works just fine to keep cars and solar cells cool. What would you do if you had a "perfect mirror" -- one that would reflect nearly 100 percent of the incident light at any angle of incidence? Would you build a better solar collector? Make a windshield coating that would reflect the heat from the sun, keeping your car cooler? Develop a coating to reflect the ultraviolet and infrared light away from a solar...

Photonics Spectra, June 1999

Let It Burn

General Motors is using an array of visible and infrared cameras to study the spread of fires in cars, recently adding two new thermal imagers for improved resolution and dynamic range. The snow outside the building nears blizzard proportions, but...

Photonics Spectra, June 1999

Metal Fabricators Pack a Photonic Punch

In the mid-1980s, the laser emerged from the laboratory as a commercial tool for industrial applications in cutting, drilling, welding, marking, etc. Wary machinists found plenty of reasons to dislike the finicky, expensive tools. In 15 years, much...

Photonics Spectra, June 1999

News Flash:

Twenty-five years ago this month, an era was born - one of sweeping changes in retailing and business management as scanning morphed from a shopping convenience to a key link in business supply chain management. For all the fanfare and wonder of the...

Photonics Spectra, June 1999

One Eye on the Road

Autonomous vehicles could someday take the driver out of the driver’s seat. Now the debate centers on which sensors offer researchers the most performance for self-navigation. For years man has envisioned a world of smart cars traveling on...

Photonics Spectra, June 1999

Oozing Into the Breach

Synthetic optical gels fill in the gaps in photonic devices, offering a no-leak alternative to optical liquids and a viscous alternative to traditional epoxies. Since the mid-1980s, manufacturers have been filling their fiber optic splices with a...

Photonics Spectra, June 1999

Camera Users:

Image intensifier tubes produce images in low-light situations, but the best tool for an application is not always obvious to the subjective human eye. Astronomy, surveillance and broadcast television use image intensifier tubes to assist in...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

Can Lasers Teach Bullets to ’Squeal’?

Often at the scene of a shooting, investigators have little evidence to work with. The shooter usually runs away with the gun, leaving behind little more than a couple of spent shell casings. Scratches and marks on a shell casing can tie it to a...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

Fiber Amplifiers:

Amplifying telecommunications signals in optical fiber systems is a relatively straightforward process: Signal photons + pump photons + erbium atoms = more signal photons. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) has changed the power...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

Photonics Brings the Big Screen to Life

The market for data projectors has grown rapidly in the past few years because of dramatic performance improvements coupled with steadily decreasing unit price. For example, several products deliver high-brightness (1000 lumens), full-color, SVGA...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

Photonics Makes Connections in Space

The first round-trip space mission to Mars would to bring back rock and soil samples for laboratory study on Earth. A critical aspect of such a mission will be the automated separation of a surface lander from an orbiting mother ship, and its...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

Progressive-Scan Gives You the Big Picture, Quickly

Global manufacturing competition and the ever-increasing requirements for improved product quality have placed greater demands on vision systems to acquire and process more visual information in shorter time periods. These demands have prompted the...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

Ultrafast Lasers - Power Isn’t Everything

Ultrafast lasers are about to enable a variety of new scientific, engineering and industrial applications. These applications range from the technical, such as high-speed circuit testing and biological imaging, to more everyday applications such as...

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

When It’s Perfection or Nothing, Quality Leaders Turn to Photonics

Every fuel rod that leaves the Westinghouse Commercial Nuclear Fuel Div. must perform flawlessly. For an industry in which a microscopic defect can lead to a three-week shutdown that costs $1 million per day, "good enough" simply isn’t enough....

Photonics Spectra, May 1999

(Emerging Technologies) Lasers:

Industrial and consumer applications in abrasives and machine tooling have used man-made diamond -- the hardest known material -- for more than 40 years. More recent research using lasers to create faster, more efficient methods for making superhard...

Photonics Spectra, April 1999

A Light-Speed Defense Against Mach-Speed Missiles

The proliferation of short- and long-range missiles did not end, as some hoped, with the Cold War. As Iraq and North Korea have illustrated, modern missile technology can lend first-class military power to poor and developing nations. Consequently,...

Photonics Spectra, April 1999

Changing the Face of Warfare:

With incidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing and nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway still fresh in the world's collective consciousness, the US and other nations have stepped up efforts to address the heightened prospect of terrorist attacks....

Photonics Spectra, April 1999

Fiber Optics Finds a Limit

Several optical effects can degrade the signal quality of optical transmission over silica glass fiber. The more well-known mechanisms, such as attenuation and chromatic dispersion, are linear in nature and can be accurately predicted. Other...

Photonics Spectra, April 1999

Lessons from the Battlefield: Technology Transfer Cuts Both Ways

As an industry, photonics can testify to the value of technology transferred out of the military. Charge-coupled devices, diode lasers and infrared imaging all owe much of their early development to defense basic research fueled by the Cold War and...

Photonics Spectra, April 1999

Night Vision:

General Motors is including a night-vision system with its newest Cadillacs, a breakthrough in mass consumer applications for a technology that has been under development for more than 50 years -- primarily for military use. From the introduction of...

Photonics Spectra, April 1999

Catch a Wave:

Light travels in straight lines, as evidenced by shadow-casting phenomenon, and the pinhole camera. The pinhole camera also helps define a "ray" of light. A point source emits light rays in all directions. A group of these rays would have a certain...

Photonics Spectra, March 1999

Lasers in the Chemistry Lab

Physicists may explore the fundamental interactions between light and matter, but in the chemistry lab these interactions get put to work. The intense monochromatic light from lasers has found application in both physical and analytical chemistry....

Photonics Spectra, March 1999

Making it Bigger:

Many manufacturing processes utilize on-line microscopy. Microscopes (optical systems with magnification greater than one) align, inspect and guide robotic assembly of precision parts. Microscopes are quite different from cameras with smaller...

Photonics Spectra, March 1999

The Small World of Medical Devices Gets Smaller

In many ways, the medical device industry is operating by the same adage the semiconductor industry has followed for years: smaller is better. This trend toward miniaturization is attributed to the changing face of healthcare throughout the world....

Photonics Spectra, March 1999

Beam Correction in Laser Diodes:

Laser diodes are now widely used in industrial, computer, communications and consumer products. These tiny semiconductor lasers have all but replaced the HeNe laser in many applications in the visible range and enticed enough customers to produce a...

Photonics Spectra, February 1999

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