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    • Volume 48, Issue 12

    More content from Volume 48, Issue 12

    (Courtesy of Foro Energy)
    A portable oil-drilling setup includes a 20 kW fiber laser and a low-loss fiber-optic cable. The high-power 1070 nm light is delivered down the well where it fractures rock, allowing a low-power mechanical drill to remove the rock. The process potentially cuts the required power for drilling by nearly 90%.
    Foro Energy has demonstrated that 20 kW of laser power delivered through a special optical fiber can drill through hard rock.
    Dec. 5, 2012
    Researchers at Tsinghua University believe they have come up with a practical way to use optical beams that carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) to increase the data-carrying ...
    Dec. 4, 2012
    Laser Raman scattering cools GaN
    While laser-based optical refrigeration methods are typically based on anti-Stokes fluorescence, researchers at Lehigh University and Johns Hopkins University may soon succeed...
    Dec. 4, 2012
    ‘Recipe’ converts optical surface roughness into BRDF and PSD
    Converting raw optical surface profilometer data (describing surface roughness) into a bidirectional-scatter distribution function (BSDF) and a power-spectral-density (PSD) function...
    Dec. 4, 2012
    Bend-resistant fiber designed to survive home users
    Glass multimode fiberoptic links are being considered that can be set up by ordinary consumers for very high-speed home networking (10 Gbit/s and greater).
    Dec. 3, 2012
    Weber beams beat the paraxial limit of Airy beams
    Despite the unique nondiffracting, self-bending, and self-healing properties of Airy beams, these beams are subject to the paraxial limit; that is, Airy beams accelerate along...
    Dec. 3, 2012
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    The use of a programmable LED array enables different imaging approaches for optical microscopy, including darkfield imaging, motionless stereo and 3D imaging, pixel-shifting ...
    Dec. 1, 2012
    FIGURE 1. The input to an imaging system is light intensity that is reflected or transmitted through the subject, and the output of the system is a digital number with a scale determined by data digitization bit depth.
    Designing the best possible vision system requires choosing among the parameters that define the performance of an imaging device: sensitivity, speed, noise, pixel bit depth, ...
    Dec. 1, 2012
    FIGURE 1. A graph shows the maximum allowable vibration improvement between robust Zygo Verifire QPZ and a Conventional Phase-Shifting instrument (a) and how it manifests itself in a phase map as fringe print-through ripple errors (b).
    Techniques that are robust or even insensitive to vibration and air turbulence expand the application range of interferometry beyond the limits of controlled environments.
    Dec. 1, 2012
    With the withdrawal or inactivation of most of the old MIL standards, future optics drawings in the US will be based on a variant of ISO 10110, such as this drawing of a simple biconvex singlet.
    US organizations are donating their expertise not only to develop a new set of national optics standards but to review and ballot ISO standards as well, ensuring that the US optics...
    Dec. 1, 2012
    (Adapted from Wikipedia)
    FIGURE 1. A single photovoltaic cell absorbs light across only part of the solar spectrum that reaches the ground, as shown by this comparison of silicon absorption with a plot of the solar spectrum. Inset shows how the theoretical maximum varies with wavelength.
    A new type of three-junction photovoltaic cell has demonstrated a record 44% efficiency under concentrated sunlight. Novel structures incorporating up to six junctions could reach...
    Dec. 1, 2012
    (Courtesy of Technische Universität München)
    FIGURE 1. A prototype system based on pulsed, tunable UV laser enables the very sensitive (less than 20 ppb) and fast (less than 2 s) detection of SO2. The H2S experiment proves that complete conversion of sulfur-containing substances to SO2 is achieved in the discharge cell.
    Spectroscopic trace analysis based on a tunable UV laser enables a prototype system to analyze motor oil consumption in combustion engines using the SO2 derived from emissions...
    Dec. 1, 2012
    (Courtesy of MIT Media Lab)
    FIGURE 1. A hidden object (a mannequin) is revealed by scattered ultrafast pulse reflections detected by a streak camera and analyzed (a). A software algorithm takes data from a streak image (b) and reconstructs a 3D image of the mannequin (c).
    Senior editor John Wallace talks the tops in photonics, bringing you his picks for the twenty most interesting technology developments covered by Laser Focus World in 2012.
    Dec. 1, 2012
    (Courtesy of Google/Connie Zhou)
    FRONTIS. An increasing amount of computing and data storage is migrating to a planetary cloud of warehouse-scale datacenters like this one.
    Photonic components already play a critical role in datacenter network deployments. Variants of existing technologies as well as emerging optical technologies will further accelerate...
    Dec. 1, 2012
    Conard Holton2
    In journalism it sometimes seems that, as Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964, the "medium is the message." Indeed, the forms of information distribution—whether video, web site, mobile...
    Dec. 1, 2012