Light & Laser News

Computer giant Intel has sold its optical components business to Cortina Systems for about $115 million; Intel will, however, maintain a minority stake in the business. The move follows in the wake of announcements of a restructuring plan that will involve the eventual loss of 10,500 people from Intel via layoffs, attrition, and the sale of various business units. One question is what will happen to Intel's headline-making research in silicon photonics, including the hybrid silicon laser produced with the University of California at Santa Barbara (shown in photo).

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Perform precision, micron, and nanometer-level material processing tasks using an industrially qualified, ultra-fast fiber laser.

Applications from waveguide-writing, to wafer scribing, to nanoparticle generation are enabled by IMRA's FCPA µJewel. IMRA provides not only the laser, but also access to a basic license covering the micromachining regime enabled by ultrafast lasers.

Certainty of Delivery, Certainty of Performance. This creed is the foundation upon which Neptec's customers have come to depend. With an impressive repertoire of fiber optic manufacturing capabilities, Neptec is the best solution to your optical products and services needs.

DDP, a leader in engineered LED solutions, has developed an LED lamp assembly for railway indication lighting applications. Housed next to train passenger doors, the Double-Sided LED Cluster Lamp works as a safety mechanism that signals the position of passenger train doors to conductors before the train departs from a station.

APEM Components, Inc., a leading manufacturer of high quality miniature and industrial switches, introduces its Q-Series of LED indicators. Offering a vibrant selection of colors, long life expectancy, and durable design, the Q-Series is an ideal complement to APEM's broad range of existing panel-mounted switches.

High luminance white LEDs are the holy grail of the solid state lighting community. Obtaining high chip-level efficiency is the idea, but in the meantime, electrically connecting a vertical stack of white, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) could yield two to four times the power of a single device. Researchers at Universal Display Corp. have demonstrated this stacked approach with color OLEDs by using a 70 nm thick aluminum electrode to act as the cathode of one device and the anode of the next. The structure does not include doped transport layers, which simplifies fabrication.

By combining a solution process with laser irradiation, researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have developed an economical method to produce metal oxide thin films at high speed and without vacuum.

In particular, the group has used excimer-laser annealing to produce ytterbium oxide superconductors (YBa₂Cu₃O₇: YBCO) by metalorganic deposition, achieving a superconduction index of 6 MA/cm².

Sometimes less is more.

Forget the digital multi-mirror devices with their giant arrays; Fraunhofer Institute engineers have integrated a single mirror and diode laser to form a 16 mm x 9 mm projector — about the size of a sugar cube. The device could eventually be integrated into a computer or a cell phone for the ultimate all-in-one unit.

By integrating a silicon carbide (SiC) lens into a near-field scanning optical microscope, scientists at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Biochemistry were able to image 500 nm diameter holes in a gold film. The so-called superlens was fabricated by a group at the University of Texas at Austin. The Texas group is working on thinner SiC lenses that may be able to offer even better resolution.

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Pacific Silicon Sensor Inc. announces the introduction of a light beam position sensor module, DL400-7PCBA, that includes processing circuits. The duolateral sensor has an active area of 20 mm x 20 mm, and can be used to measure light beam movement with considerable accuracy to automatically align lasers in optical instruments.

The A-Star is an LED lighting strip from TerraLUX, Inc., with the form factor of a fluorescent tubular light. Available in lengths from 1-8 ft and beyond (special order), the highly reliable units can be powered from a variety of sources. They are supplied with 110 VAC to 240 VAC wall adapters.

You've heard of fly by light, but now an optical switch could lead to photonic control of elevators, rudders, and other flight hardware, displacing heavy, fire-prone electrical harnesses. Texas A&M University researchers developed the prototype switch, which consists of a cantilever bonded to a Fabry-Perot interferometer. Applying pressure to the switch changes the size of the Fabry-Perot cavity, altering the resultant interference pattern to generate an optical signal.

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Optical communications just inched a bit closer to supreme security with the help of a tungsten-based single-photon detector. Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Albion College teamed up to send quantum keys over 184.6 km of optical fiber, an increase of more than 50% over the previous distance record of 122 km. Based on entangled states, quantum cryptography using quantum keys holds the promise of totally secure communications.

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In work that holds promise for ultrabright free-electron lasers, a team from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and Oxford University has used laser-wakefield acceleration to generate 1 GeV in a mere 3.3 cm of travel. Unlike the 3.2 km long Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), which can only generate 20 MeV/m, the laser-based system can reach 100 GeV/m. The SLAC can admittedly create more absolute juice, but requires a lot more leg room to do so. The LBL/Oxford group uses a multipulse approach with a plume of hydrogen gas to achieve their results.

Connecting quantum dots by wires allows Ohio University and University of Florida researchers to better control the Kondo effect, whereby electrons trapped around magnetic impurities in semiconductors change their spin.

The work could provide insight for researchers studying quantum phase transitions.

Ocean Optics' LS-1-CAL is a tungsten-halogen light source designed for calibrating the absolute spectral response of a radiometric system consisting of a spectrometer and an optical fiber. Each light source emits a spectral intensity that's calibrated to standards traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

AC/DC and DC/DC power supplies with DSP control, booster circuit, and robust switching design allow for extreme output surge requirements in an ultra-dense solution. Unique internal energy storage system for rock solid outputs, unaffected by line and load fluctuations. Standard and custom designs available.

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People who show up at the office hacking and snuffling in a sense of misguided nobility probably decrease office productivity by getting others sick.

Read the rant and pick up some useful tips that may help you keep from falling prey to someone else's germs.

Do you dream in Zemax and Code V? If so, then you've got a whole range of job opportunities right now. A Rochester-based company seeks a specialist in visible optics, with experience in SolidWorks. If you prefer a start-up environment, a pre-IPO opto-electronics firm wants an optical systems designer capable of helping shepherd a product to market. If military/aerospace is your bag, a major defense contractor is looking for a senior optical engineer — if they get the contract.

It's not as cool as a shoe phone, but for you road warriors, this optical mouse that doubles as a voice-over-IP phone is an all-in-one you can use. It even offers speaker phone capabilities.

Meanwhile, for you germ-phobic folks, there’s a laser mouse that's self-cleaning and bacteria free, courtesy of a titanium-oxide and silver nanocoating. It just doesn't get any better than this.

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Photonic technology is beginning to come to the fashion world, and it ain't Cinderella's light-up dress in the Main Street Electrical Parade. German fashion designer Anke Loh is using an LED-enabled fabric to display full-color moving images on the clothing in her fall collection — a battery operated dress. Let's hope none of the wearers ever gets tossed in a pool — it would give a whole new meaning to the phrase fashion victim.

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