With parameters such as quantum efficiency, signal-to-noise ratio, resolution, and speed all coming into play in the low-light-imaging arena, ICCD cameras can offer a quantifiable improvement over EMCCD- or sCMOS-based cameras at the single-photon level.

A new white-light microscope uses microsphere superlenses to magnify underlying near-field objects up to eight times before projecting them into a conventional microscope's objective lens, providing new opportunities to image viruses and biomolecules in real time.

Subwavelength antennas in the metal interconnection layer of an inexpensive CMOS chip couple terahertz radiation to the chip's electronics, enabling the creation of inexpensive, compact imagers.

Several new phase-based techniques allow the refractive-index profile of an optical fiber itself to be measured, rather than that of its preform; in addition, the measurements are taken through the side of the fiber, producing data all along the fiber's length.

A new generation of Q-switched solid-state lasers is enabling thin-film laser scribing with a new set of processing parameters: High quality scribes for amorphous-silicon thin-film PV structures can be achieved at almost twice current scribing speeds.

A "leaky wave" nonresonant plasmonic slot antenna designed by three researchers at the University of Toronto is predicted to be a very efficient way to couple light from nanoscale optical circuits to the far-field.

Optical scanners intended to modulate or deflect light are often galvanometer-based mechanical systems.

An 81-channel microspectrometer with 2-μm-diameter singlemode microdonut resonators as its sensing elements is vastly shrunken in size compared to conventional spectrometers, but without sacrificing resolution.

Dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF), which has a large negative dispersion coefficient, is used in long-haul telecommunications networks to counterbalance positive dispersion in the rest of the network; this prevents the signal from being degraded.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a broadband trace-gas sensor that they say is 100 times faster and more sensitive than similar technologies.

Magnetorheological finishing is an optical-fabrication technique whose name is synonymous with QED Technologies and with good reason: MRF, invented in the former Soviet Union and further developed at the University of Rochester's Center for Optics Manufacturing, was then commercialized by QED and has been extensively developed by the company ever since.

Researchers at the Flaum Eye Institute and the Institute of Optics, both at the University of Rochester, have created a reflective scanning ophthalmoscope that for the first time clearly and directly images rods in the living human eye.

The ability to image surface-plasmon resonances allows researchers to map the local electric fields that create the unusual optoelectronic properties of metamaterials, for example.

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)-tunable vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) would be ideal for swept-source optical-coherence tomography (OCT) applications due to their micron-scale cavity length and low mirror mass for high sweep speeds, singlemode operation without mode hops, and long dynamic coherence length for long imaging range.

Interest in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectral region continues to grow for applications in molecular fingerprinting, IR countermeasures, near-field microscopy, and materials processing.

Many mid-infrared (mid-IR) solid-state laser sources do not operate at room-temperature due to the deactivation of energy accumulated in the gain media via nonradiative phonon-assisted decay.