Optics News and Information- Laser Focus World

Optics, or the manipulation of light by mirrors, lenses, prisms, diffraction gratings, and/or other optical elements, is a discipline that has been around for thousands of years. Legend has it that Archimedes used one or more mirrors to reflect and focus sunlight onto Roman warships in 212 B.C. Although this may be no more than a myth, even the existence of the legend indicates that a practical knowledge of reflective optics existed back then.

By 1300 A.D., refractive lenses were being ground and polished for use as eyeglasses. In the early 1600s, Galileo fabricated a refractive telescope containing a converging (positive) objective lens and a diverging (negative) eyepiece lens, which allowed him to discover the moons of Jupiter. In 1660, Anton van Leeuwenhoek created the field of biological optics when he used a microscope with a single biconvex lens to examine microorganisms at a magnification of 270X.

In modern times, optics are found seemingly everywhere. High-energy and high-power laser optics enable laser-processing of materials in industry; low-power laser optics aid research, are integrated into microscopes and other optical instrumentation, and can be found in the form of small molded aspheres in CD players. Optics for incoherent light--often complex multielement assemblies of achromatic design--are at the heart of consumer digital cameras, machine-vision systems, and spectrometers and other instruments. Infrared optics aid covert vision and thermal analysis, while ultraviolet optics are used in photolithography to fabricate computer chips.

The advent of sophisticated optical design and fabrication techniques, multilayer optical coatings, and ultraviolet, visible, and infrared optical materials with novel refractive index and dispersion properties has made modern traditional optics possible. Newer forms of optics further push the boundaries. Diffractive optics in its many forms--ruled or holographic gratings, diffractive optical elements, subwavelength optics--can focus or disperse light spectrally, act as an antireflection coating, or even create sophisticated images from a simple coherent laser beam. Nonlinear optics alter the wavelength of a laser beam, while integrated optics guide light through waveguides at the microscopic level. Adaptive optics sharpen the view in astronomical telescopes or even medical optical systems. Photonic crystals and metamaterials promise new types of optics such as superprisms and superlenses. Terahertz optics allow imaging through normally opaque materials. And, at the cutting edge, plasmonics promise integrated photonic circuits with optical components down to the nanoscale level.

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