The financial earthquake that rattled worldwide economies in 2008/2009 has subsided, but aftershocks continue; European debt and a possible slowdown in China give laser companies pause against the comparatively calm (and lucrative) backdrop of 2010/2011.

The low noise of a 577 nm CW optically pumped semiconductor laser enables researchers to image cellular structures and membrane dynamics with unprecedented resolution using blue/green fluorophores.

Fiber laser performance at the kilowatt power level has been improved by the careful matching of active and passive fibers, which has led to higher-power operation while maintaining singlemode beam quality.

Tunable diode laser spectroscopy enabled by distributed-feedback laser diodes with monomode tuning behavior in the wavelength range exceeding 3 µm expands hydrocarbon sensing.

Chirped volume holographic gratings offer high damage threshold and an ultracompact footprint for improvements in chirped pulse amplification laser systems.

Born at the cutting edge of ultrafast spectroscopy a dozen years ago, now frequency combs are being developed for applications from astronomy to radar and telecommunications.

Integrated with metallic optical nano-antennae, superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors become faster and more efficient.

Smart terahertz scanning reflectometer and spectrometer systems exploit the ability of terahertz radiation to penetrate nonmetallic objects and sense the motions of molecules.

A phased-array slow-light detection and ranging ("slidar") setup relies on a tunable laser source and fiber sections that have different dispersions; the result is a fast and simple beam steerer.

The number of optical fibers needed for access networks using passive optical network (PON) architectures is increasing demand for high-density fiber cables. An interesting solution to this congestion could be multicore fibers from OFS Laboratories.

Engineers at Osram AG have developed a stacked organic light-emitting diode (OLED) architecture that improves output characteristics and increases lifetime compared to conventional single-active-layer OLEDs.

A flexible metamaterial film created by researchers at the Technical University of Denmark and Boston University drastically reduces reflection of terahertz radiation, and can serve as a "stealth" material to minimize objects' radar cross-section at terahertz frequencies.

Researchers at the Technischen Universität Darmstadt have demonstrated a state of light that is at the same time incoherent in the first order (spectrally broadband) and yet coherent in the second order.

A group from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and LPI has created a plastic RXI collimator for LEDs that does not require any metalization.

To maintain the bandwidth demands for future communications networks, integrated-photonics architectures based on silicon photonics and other semiconductor platforms are being developed at numerous research institutions.

A lidar system called Raman-shifted Eye-safe Aerosol Lidar (REAL), originally developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and refined at California State University–Chico, images the movement of atmospheric features to determine two-component wind data and horizontal wind-vector maps.

It was hypothesized almost 50 years ago that the Vikings used birefringent crystals to find the direction of skylight polarization that determined the position of the sun behind clouds and fog.

A new technique from Texas A&M University (TAMU) and The National Center of Mathematics & Physics (KACST) that uses two lasers and exploits molecular oscillations in the lithographic photoresist material is simple to implement and achieves arbitrarily small feature sizes.

Researchers at the Environmental Research Station Schneefernerhaus, high in the German Alps, have developed a high-power differential-absorption lidar (DIAL) that can measure the vertical distribution of water vapor in the free troposphere.

A group of scientists has come up with a new space gravitational-wave-observatory design called Lagrange (LAser GRavitational-wave ANtenna at GEo-lunar Lagrange points) that would be half the cost of the now-abandoned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA).