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Photovoltaic cells have existed since the late 19th century, but they still generate only a minuscule amount of energy around the world because--with a few exceptions--it is far more expensive [...]

Hundreds of years of development in microscopy and spectroscopy have made optical imaging a tremendously useful tool for materials research and biology. But what happens when features shrink to sizes [...]

On the page or on the screen, we are accustomed to looking at two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects. For many applications, two-dimensional (2-D) displays are sufficient. But users need or [...]

Quality control on the factory floor--and the closely related activity of nondestructive testing--has long used visible imaging systems. Some applications also use infrared, ultraviolet, or x-ray wavelengths. Now, systems operating [...]

For the past few decades, robots have become more sophisticated but each interface is custom-made and requires the user to have technical skill. 'We are constantly forced to learn a [...]

Most displays are big and conspicuous. Head-up displays (HUDs), on the other hand, make the data conspicuous while hiding the display equipment. A HUD is any display that presents data [...]

Human brains are optimized to recognize and distinguish between faces--we can identify people we know, even with pliable features, changing facial hair, glasses, or makeup, even under different illumination or [...]

This year's Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics and the International Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/IQEC; May 16-21; San Francisco, CA) will include thousands of technical papers, a distinguished list of invited [...]

Recent progress toward realizing the key technological elements needed for long-distance, high-fidelity quantum-bit teleportation was described in an invited paper by Jeff Shapiro of MIT (Cambridge, MA) at the 2003 [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] * Superresolution microscopy * Visible light microscopy * Fluorescence microscopy * Drug discovery * Neuroscience. Superresolution microscopy is a collection of recently developed techniques that use visible light [...]

* Optics * Negative refractive lenses New optics are coming. The lenses made using these new optics will be revolutionary: they will have capabilities never before possible in optical elements. [...]

Photonic crystals, silicon photonics, and surface plasmons were all discussed at the OSA topical meetings on Integrated Photonics Research and Applications (IPRA) and Nanophotonics (April 24-28; Uncasville, CT). One exciting [...]

Zinc oxide materials have the potential to give GaN a run for its money as a material for visible and UV light sources. At the fall 2005 meeting of the [...]

Images with a resolution of less than an angstrom were obtained from an electron microscope at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Oak Ridge, TN). (1) Steve Pennycook and other researchers incorporated [...]

Introduced only a few years ago, photonic-bandgap crystals are now being incorporated into a first generation of devices. Ralf Wehrspohn, at the University of Paderborn (Paderborn, Germany), explains that these [...]

Lattices of inorganic-organic hybrid polymers designed as photonic crystals have been achieved with resolutions down to 100 nm. Ruth Houbertz and others at the Fraunhofer Institute (Wuerzburg, Germany) with Boris [...]

A fast modulator made of silicon (Si) may make researchers take another look at the material, which has been largely forsaken by the optoctectronics industry in favor of other semiconductors [...]

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have invented a transistor in which the signal output of one of the terminals is IR light. Milton Feng, Nick Holonyak [...]

Over the past several years, work on organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) has overcome problems such as current injection, resulting in devices with total efficiencies higher than 10%. Most research has [...]

Diamond optics transmit over a large spectral range, conduct heat very well, resist etching, and are exceedingly hard. These same properties, however, make fabricating diamond optics difficult--standard methods of micromachining [...]

A silica-based 16 x 16 strictly nonblocking matrix thermo-optic switch with a bandwidth that covers the entire EDFA gain region offers an average insertion loss of 6.6 dB, extinction ratio [...]

Norbert Keil and others at The Henrich-Hertz-Institut fur Nachrichtentechnnik (Berlin) have designed an all-polymer arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) wavelength router that exhibits good optical performance and athermal operation.[1] They demonstrated [...]

Future high-speed optical communications systems could benefit from wide-band sources that produce high-repetition-rate, chirp-free pulses with high extinction ratios. Systems have been designed to deliver such pulses, but few meet [...]

Australian researchers recently made long-period gratings in regular silica fiber that exhibit relatively low loss and strong wavelength-dependent transmission and that may be useful for a variety of WDM devices.[1] [...]

Nonlinear optical mirrors combined with dispersion management can control dispersion so well that, theoretically, solitons could be transmitted over unlimited distances of single, mode fiber. Sonia Boscolo, Sergei Turitsyn, and [...]

Researchers at the Laboratory for Physical Sciences and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, formed single-mode optical channel-dropping filters by using vertically coupled microring resonators.[1] Rohit Grover [...]

Tadashi Kasamatsu and others at NEC Corp. (Nakahara-ku, Kawasaki, Japan) developed a fiber amplifier for the 1480- to 1510-nm band with efficiency of 29%, which rivals that of erbium-doped fiber [...]

A surface-emitting laser with an external cavity mirror produced more than 500 mW of 980-nm [TEM.sub.00] output with 90% coupling efficiency into a single-mode fiber. The erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) [...]

A tunable Fabry-Perot (FP) filter made of silicon decreases dispersion in long-haul transmission systems that use DWDM transmitters. Tapio Niemi and others at the Helsinki University of Technology (Finland) developed [...]

Using a combination of fiber types and distributed amplification, Jake Bromage and others at Lucent Technologies (Holmdel, NJ) demonstrated transmission of 40 channels of NRZ data, each at 10 Gbit/s, [...]

A linear optical amplifier that fits on a single chip was demonstrated in a switched high-speed WDM environment. Dan A. Francis and others at Genoa Corp. (Fremont, CA) integrated a [...]

Kishan Dholakia and others at St. Andrews University (Fife, Scotland) have modified optical-tweezer techniques to provide rotational control of objects held in laser beams.[1] Applications range from improved biological and [...]

A titanium-doped lithium niobate device acts as a reflective optical switch with promise for DWDM applications, including fiber-to-the-home. Roger Krahenbuhl at Virginia Tech (VPI; Blacksburg, VA) and coworkers at SFA [...]

Researchers at Corning Incorporated have developed a polarization-mode-dispersion (PMD) compensator for 10-Gbit/s systems that has a response time of 200 ms. Polarization-mode dispersion is the statistical ensemble average of differential-group [...]

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge, MA) has committed to build a new fabrication facility for MIT Microphotonics Center researchers. The new facility will add the capability of fabricating [...]

A microetectromechanical systems (MEMS) switch that could replace movable mirror switches for telecommunications applications was described by Ivan Shubin and Patrick LiKamWa at the IEEE LEOS Conference in Rio Grande, [...]

An optical time-domain demultiplexer based on an unusual design demonstrated demultiplexing an 80-Gbit/s signal to 10 Gbit/s using fiber cross-phase modulation and filtering. Future high-bit-rate systems are likely to use [...]

Nonlinear effects of polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) occur faster than standard compensators can track, report researchers from Lucent Technologies Bell Labs (Holmdel, NJ) at the IEEE LEOS Annual Meeting in Rio [...]

Microcavities have the potential to be enormously efficient lasers. Several groups of researchers are capitalizing on a method of growing tiny pyramids of high-quality gallium nitride (GaN) that could potentially [...]

A novel type of fiber could enable a whole range of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)-related applications because it offers widely tailorable dispersion and mode-propagating properties. The fibers are made of silica [...]

Researchers at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque (UNM) are developing lead glasses that offer more-efficient diffraction gratings than the germanosilicate glasses currently used for fiber gratings. The glasses [...]

An optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on rubidium titanyl arsenate (RTA) provided 280-fs signal pulses, without dispersion compensation, at a pulse-repetition rate of 344 MHz. This is four times the [...]

A breakthrough in using lasers to accelerate electrons, achieved by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley, CA) and Oxford University (Oxford, England), could be used to create [...]

Integrated optoelectronics that leverage microelectronics technology are being developed around the world. Recent work on devices made using silicon (Si), germanium (Ge), carbon, and tin was presented in late September [...]

At the Society for Information Display (SID) International Symposium 2005 (May 22-27; Boston, MA), researchers from a Philips spin-off company demonstrated an active-matrix display that can be rolled into a [...]

An optical device based on a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) demonstrated waveform inversion of a 5-GHz sine wave, according to researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo, Japan) and Coming [...]

Detection of traces of explosive or poisonous gases like methane, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, or acetylene is sometimes desired in places that are inaccessible or dangerous to humans. Or perhaps one [...]