Cosmic events highlight detector advances | Laser Focus World

Ground-based and spacecraft-based telescopes are demanding advanced detector products; industrial applications are also growing fast.

Optical-fiber lasers and amplifiers move ahead

More in Detectors & Imaging

New Suite of Femtosecond Lasers Lowers Costs and Complexity of Microscopy

New Suite of Femtosecond Lasers Lowers Costs and Complexity of Microscopy

With breakthrough price in a common form-fit-function package, the Axon family of lasers decrease the entry barrier to two-photon and harmonic generation microscopy, as well as applications to material modification, photopolymerization, and inspection.

Trilinear color camera from Teledyne DALSA available

The Piranha 4 8k trilinear color camera uses a CMOS 8k trilinear sensor.

Machine vision can be used to harvest lettuce at the peak of ripeness and make multiple passes over a field, maximizing crop yield. Lettuce is currently picked by hand and the field is passed only once, leaving much of the product behind.

Vegebot machine vision automates lettuce harvesting

Once considered a vegetable that could not be harvested by a robot, lettuce could now be picked automatically, maximizing yield and minimizing waste.

The Opioid Detection Challenge aims to detect opioids in mail packages using a suite of scientific technologies.

Headwall hyperspectral sensors enter accelerator stage of Opioid Detection Challenge

The Opioid Detection Challenge is a U.S. program to design equipment that non-invasively detects opioids in mailed packages.

A five-mile run in the morning before a workshop was one of EPIC’s community-building recipes.

Engaging with the photonics community

The European Photonic Industry Consortium (EPIC) is growing rapidly and fostering the photonics industry community in Europe and beyond.

Mikrotron's MotionBLITZ Cube high-speed camera is used for troubleshooting purposes in manufacturing.

Mikrotron cameras help drug-dispenser manufacturer optimize manufacturing processes

Decade-long use of a high-speed camera from Mikrotron uncovered manufacturing errors, helping Nemera optimize syringe production and numerous other processes.

A Mini Blackbird SXGA MWIR detector is one of the MWIR detectors that SCD will provide in its three contracts.

SCD awarded several contracts to supply MWIR high-definition detectors

Three contracts totaling $40 million were signed with three different European and North American customers.

Military aircraft, missile tracking systems, and ground troops who rely on night-vision systems could benefit from a new generation of infrared imaging devices made with a powerful semiconducting material developed by University of Arkansas researchers and their colleagues at several institutions.

DoD awards University of Arkansas $7.5M to advance infrared detectors

The $7.5 million dollar award from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is part of its Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative, or MURI.

These sensors from the SmartSens/MEMS Drive partnership will feature added stabilization control to the rotation of the sensor, achieving optimal stabilization with no less than 5 axes.

SmartSens partners with MEMS Drive on CMOS chip-based image stabilization

The companies will collaborate on research in the field of CMOS chip-level optical image stabilization (OIS) technologies for new application areas.

James C. Wyant with Maria Ruiz in 2014, a first-year graduate student at the College of Optical Sciences, who that year received a Louise Wyant Memorial Scholarship in Optical Sciences. James Wyant and his family are now contributing $2 million and SPIE $500,000 to an educational-funding initiative for optics and photonics.

With $500,000 grant to University of Arizona, SPIE launches $2.5 million endowment matching program

Gooch & Housego (G&H) is partnering with Optex Systems to provide acrylic sighting instruments to the European market. Shown here are some Optex sighting systems.

Gooch & Housego partners with Optex to supply acrylic optics

The partnership combines Optex acrylic periscope products with G&H’s next-generation glass periscope hardware portfolio.

Tracks of heavy ions 'imprinted' in lithium fluoride crystals. At the top, spot tracks observed under a fluorescence microscope in plates perpendicular to the heavy ion beam. At the bottom, the ion tracks in the parallel oriented plate (the blurring at both ends of the trace is an artifact of the depth of focus of the microscope). False colors.

Lithium fluoride fluorescent crystals track high-energy heavy ions such as iron

In comparison to previous crystals such as aluminum oxide, LiF crystals also require a less expensive microscope for analysis.

A fast, low-cost, highly sensitive diffuse optical imaging system acquires optical transmission images dorsally to provide objective, quantitative analysis for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) diagnosis and monitoring.

Spectroscopy/Optical Imaging: Fourier-transform analysis helps optical method improve RA detection

A noninvasive near-infrared diffuse optical imaging (DOI) system combines 3D digital imaging and infrared (IR) spectroscopy to map blood content in a patient’s hand for detection of rheumatoid arthritis.

FIGURE 1. The tip of a 30,000-core optical fiber bundle is shown next to an Australian 5 cent coin for scale (left) and a zoomed-in image (right) reveals a small region of the fiber bundle facet (dashed red box in left). Each core is roughly 2 µm in diameter and separated from its neighbors by an average of 3.3 µm.

Fiber-optic Components: Fiber-optic bundles provide 3D stereo imaging

With each fiber acting as an independent pixel, coherent fiber bundles transmit more information than just a 2D representation of an image; specifically, the spatial light field faithfully encodes 3D stereo data.