On-chip wavelength stabilization technology for high-power laser diodes operating between 700 and 2000 nm brings an accurate and narrow spectral width that is locked over a wide temperature range, enabling new laser diode applications.

Basing a white-light scanning interferometer on a color CCD camera with three separate chips reduces root-mean-square (RMS) measurement error.

With an emission wavelength that reaches from the mid-IR to the far-IR and high power efficiency, quantum-cascade lasers are the heart of powerful chemical sensors for environmental monitoring, homeland security, and medical diagnostics.

Improved high harmonic generation techniques are squeezing pulse duration down toward zeptosecond time scales, and have extended frequency-comb spectroscopy into the extreme ultraviolet.

With carefully controlled absorption and scattering losses, high-reflectivity, low-loss dielectric mirrors enable demanding applications such as gravitational-wave detection and cavity ring-down spectroscopy.

Once limited to destructive chemical and laboratory intensive procedures, the processing of crime scene evidence is now possible using nondestructive photonics technology—even when trace evidence is minute or microscopic in size.

The implementation of multilevel modulation formats, in conjunction with coherent detection, will significantly increase the information capacity of future fiber-optic links through increased spectral efficiency.

A reflective fiber-optic refractometer with a thin-core fiber (TCF) section achieves a sensitivity of 133/26 dB/refractive-index unit for temperature immune surrounding-refractive-index (SRI) measurement.

A group at the University of Washington has demonstrated phosphors based on silicon (Si) quantum dots (QDs) that are efficient emitters (with an external quantum efficiency up to 15.9%), can be made to have a peak wavelength that falls anywhere from the near-IR to the green, and can be fabricated cheaply.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (Cambridge, MA) have developed two algorithms that are faster than the fast Fourier transform (FFT) for all sparse signals.

Researchers from the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa who had previously demonstrated the one-dimensional (1D) steering of a lidar beam using slow light have now used two independent slow-light mechanisms to steer a lidar beam in two dimensions.

Unlike fused silica and oxyfluoride glasses that cannot survive in some harsh environments, a new transparent ceramic for high-energy laser (HEL) systems developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NR) can withstand impact from rain droplets at 600 mph and sand particles at speeds up to 460 mph with no change in transmission parameters.

University of Cambridge researchers can see quantum mechanics at work with the naked eye.

A superconducting array of cryogenic microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) is the basis of a photon-counting focal-plane array developed by researchers at the University of California–Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that operates from the UV to the near-IR.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have developed a variety of streak camera that can be used to create trillion frame/s visualizations—slowing down and capturing even the motion of speed-of-light photons.

To officially launch its i-series of high-efficiency, environmentally friendly automobiles at the Frankfurt International Motor Show IAA, BMW used the services of Lobo, a laser light-show company, to create effects that included a “birthing tunnel” of blue laser light.

Access Optical Networks (AON) has developed several technologies for holographic data storage (HDS) with write-only, read-only, and rewrite capability in a volumetric crystal media.