Search Results for: optics

Introduction to Motion Control Instrumentation Motion control is the combination of mechanics and electronics to regulate the position, speed and acceleration of moving parts in a controlled manner. It is ...

Introduction to Prisms Even as early as in the 13th century, six-sided crystals of natural quartz were used to generate rainbows. In the late 1660s, people believed that color was a mixture of lightness ...

Basics of Lamp-Pumped Solid State (LPSS) Lasers As the trailblazer for many modern day laser designs, LPSS lasers are a mature technology that have been around since the invention of the first laser. The ...

Introduction to Diffraction Gratings Diffraction gratings are optical components that diffract and separate light into several beams at different angles by wavelength. Their working principle is hinged ...

Introduction to Ultrafast Lasers The ultrafast laser is a category of laser that emits ultrashort light pulses with time spans of femtoseconds or picoseconds. To put this in perspective, ultrafast lasers ...

Introduction to Optical Parametric Oscillators In 1961, Peter Franken and his group at the University of Michigan were the first to use  nonlinear materials to produce optical harmonics. This method ...

Forensic science has come a long way since the 700s, when the Chinese first established the concept of utilizing fingerprints as means of identification. Since then, technology in photonics and optics ...

How do lasers work? This blog spends much time discussing the use and the applications of lasers, but how do they work? Lasers emit a coherent light beam from a cavity. The term “laser” is actually an ...

Introduction A single human hair is approximately 80,000-100,000 nanometers wide. Now, imagine a distance that measures several hundred times smaller than a human hair. Such small distances are often ...

Introduction: Acousto-Optic Modulator Optical setups require extreme precision, and researchers must often implement modulators to adjust the frequency, amplitude, wavelength, and direction of their laser ...