OPTICAL COMPONENTS, COATINGS, & MATERIALS INSIGHTS

Prisms are solid glass optics that are ground and polished into geometrical and optically significant shapes. The angle, position, and number of surfaces help define the type and function. One of the most recognizable uses of prisms, as demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton, consists of dispersing a beam of white light into its component colors.
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Asphere Lenses: Let's Put The Pieces Together
Ignoring materials, intended usage, manufacturability, or measurability often leads to an asphere lens that's too expensive to produce and too difficult to measure. The pieces need to fit together to ensure maximized performance and cost effectiveness.
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Eradicating Preventable Blindness In The Developing World
Worldwide, approximately 285 million people are visually impaired, and 80% of these cases are the result of preventable causes. To continuously observe patients’ eyes without irritation, Forus Health’s designs incorporate both stock and custom optical components from Edmund Optics to capture high quality images in both visible and near-infrared (NIR) spectra.
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How Optical Coatings Impact High-Powered UV Lasers
High powered lasers, such as those in the ultra-violet (UV) wavelength range (100 to 400 nm) are now used in medical, micro-machining, semi-conductor chip manufacturing, automotive, and defense, and aerospace technologies. UV lasers have distinct advantages over visible light and infrared lasers.
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Precision Optics For Military Applications
This application note reviews a number of precision optics suitable for military applications, including corner cube retro-reflectors, integrator rods, mirrors, windows, and cube beamsplitters, as well as a wide variety of prisms.
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Ultrafast Dispersion
While the effect of dispersion is minimal for many types of laser systems, it is especially problematic in ultrafast laser applications. Ultrafast lasers are characterized by short pulse durations on the order of picoseconds, femtoseconds, or attoseconds.
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Optical Flats
An optical flat is a precisely polished flat surface, used as a reference against which the flatness of an unknown surface may be compared. Edmund Optics offers both single surface and dual surface optical flats in either ZERODUR® or Fused Silica.
OPTICAL SOLUTIONS
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BOROFLOAT® 33 is a UV-NIR transparent borosilicate float glass with excellent optical properties and smooth low scatter surfaces straight off the float process. It is an economical high performance material, making it ideal for the volume manufacture of windows, mirrors, filters, display glass, 3D build platforms, and other components.
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ZC&R Coatings for Optics (ZC&R), an Abrisa Technologies company, designs and manufactures innovative precision thin film coating solutions for micro-electronics, defense and avionics, display, industrial automation, optical sensors and imaging, photonics, medical/dental, life science analytics, and other market applications.
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Abrisa Technologies offers the PRO-HC-VIS1, a protective anti-abrasion hard coat clear glass coating option for high traffic contact scanner applications, which delivers up to 40X more linear taber abrasion resistance when compared to uncoated glass and HIE chemically-strengthened glass surfaces.
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G&H’s Superpolishing process delivers Scratch-Dig of 5-2, less than 0.5 Å of surface roughness, and zero defects at 300x magnification for ring laser gyroscope (RLG) mirrors, R&D applications, short wavelength and ultrafast lasers.
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Abrisa Technologies provides Dead Front Panels for Backlit Display and User Interface applications that afford equipment designers greater flexibility in achieving the overall clean lines and sleek uncluttered aesthetics they seek.
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SCHOTT D263® T eco is a clear, lightweight, low fluorescence, borosilicate glass available from Abrisa Technologies in thicknesses from 0.07 mm to 1.1 mm with excellent luminous transmission and high chemical resistance.
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This high resolution C-Mount SWIR lens with 25.4mm image circle is designed for the 800 - 1800 nm spectral range. With its robust mechanical design and locking screws for focus and iris it maintains its high optical imaging performance even in harsh environment. A special SWIR coating and internal lacquering reduces stray light, resulting in a high contrast images.
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Schneider Optics' Charoite Lens is a compact 2/3" C-Mount SWIR lens, designed for the 800 - 1800 nm spectral range. With its robust mechanical design and locking screws for focus and iris it maintains its high optical imaging performance even in harsh environment. A special SWIR coating and internal lacquering reduces stray light, resulting in a high contrast images.
OPTICAL NEWS
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Metalenz CEO Robert Devlin, who cofounded the company alongside Harvard University Professor of Applied Physics Federico Capasso, discusses the company’s beginnings, how its business partnership evolved, the challenges of integrating into consumer products, and what he believes is the future of metasurface optics.
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Compared to spherical lenses, aspheres result in better resolution, higher light throughput, and even a reduction in the number of optical elements. However, they often feature sharper surface angles, and this steepness introduces some unique challenges to the coating process.
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Precision Glass & Optics, a global leader in optical manufacturing, precision thin-film coatings, and complete optical solutions, offers precision optics on large polished substrates up to 30” in diameter.
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Metalenz metasurfaces are now on the market through its partnership with STMicroelectronics, marking the introduction of this revolutionary optical technology in real-world devices.
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Peter de Groot, Chief Scientist at Zygo Corporation, has been nominated as a candidate for 2023 vice president of SPIE: the International Society for Optics and Photonics. The newly elected vice president will serve as president-elect in 2024 and president of the Society in 2025.
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Precision Glass & Optics is offering an innovative re-polishing service that can give an optic new life when the original dielectric coating does not meet the specifications or was damaged during the manufacturing process.
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Chroma Technology announced today that its ContrastMax SWIR optical filters for machine vision and remote sensing were recognized among the best in machine vision today by the judges of the Vision Systems Design 2022 Innovators Awards program at the Automate Show in Detroit.
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Depth sensing is a critical technology in autonomous robots, AR/VR, face recognition, and logistics. Flat optics-based dot pattern generators and imaging lenses, customized to the VCSEL source and the ToF sensor, can make for a highly compact, efficient, and robust system.
OPTICAL VIDEOS
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Video: See The Unseen With Ophir Optics
Ophir IR Optics products include highly advanced electro-optical solutions and can be found in the most critical defense and commercial thermal imaging applications. When reliability is the name of the game, Ophir is your trusted partner.
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Optical Trends And Solutions In The Defense Market
Photonics Online met with Kevin Quist of Edmund Optics on the second day of SPIE’s 2022 Defense + Commercial Sensing trade show to discuss upcoming defense trends. Trends such as laser optics systems have led Edmund Optics to acquire a new warehouse in Florida for high-power laser coatings.
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G&H Introduces Two New Lens Series At DCS 2022
At Defense + Commercial Sensing, G&H’s J.J. Conboy explained the precision features of the NightCrawlIR and FireAnt lens series and invited customers to learn more about these products and their applications.
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Optical Filters In Remote Sensing
Jason Palidwar of Iridian Spectral Technologies talks to Photonics Online at Defense + Commercial Sensing 2022 about Iridian’s optical filters and how they’re used in remote sensing applications including earth observation and gas detection.
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Introduction To VFA+
The VFA+ leverages the benefits of Fizeau interferometry through a unique combination of precise, high-resolution, fast, and full aperture metrology for axisymmetric aspheres.