The optical system of the ELT showing the location of the mirrors.
Optical engineering is the field of engineering encompassing the physical phenomena and technologies associated with the generation, transmission, manipulation, detection, and utilization of light.[2] Optical engineers use the science of optics to solve problems and to design and build devices that make light do something useful.[3] They design and operate optical equipment that uses the properties of light using physics and chemistry,[4] such as lenses, microscopes, telescopes, lasers, sensors, fiber-optic communication systems and optical disc systems (e.g. CD, DVD).
Optical engineering metrology uses optical methods to measure either micro-vibrations with instruments like the laser speckle interferometer, or properties of masses with instruments that measure refraction.[5]
Nano-measuring and nano-positioning machines are devices designed by optical engineers. These machines, for example microphotolithographic steppers, have nanometer precision, and consequently are used in the fabrication of goods at this scale.[6]
The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light; it is the inverse of the system's optical power. A positive focal length indicates that a system converges light, while a negative focal length indicates that the system diverges light. A system with a shorter focal length bends the rays more sharply, bringing them to a focus in a shorter distance or diverging them more quickly. For the special case of a thin lens in air, a positive focal length is the distance over which initially collimated (parallel) rays are brought to a focus, or alternatively a negative focal length indicates how far in front of the lens a point source must be located to form a collimated beam. For more general optical systems, the focal length has no intuitive meaning; it is simply the inverse of the system's optical power.
Photonics is a branch of optics that involves the application of generation, detection, and manipulation of light in form of photons through emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and sensing. Photonics is closely related to quantum electronics, where quantum electronics deals with the theoretical part of it while photonics deal with its engineering applications. Though covering all light's technical applications over the whole spectrum, most photonic applications are in the range of visible and near-infrared light. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.
A video camera is an optical instrument that captures videos, as opposed to a movie camera, which records images on film. Video cameras were initially developed for the television industry but have since become widely used for a variety of other purposes.
The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is an astronomical observatory under construction. When completed, it will be the world's largest optical/near-infrared extremely large telescope. Part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) agency, it is located on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
SPIE is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It organizes technical conferences, trade exhibitions, and continuing education programs for researchers and developers in the light-based fields of physics, including: optics, photonics, and imaging engineering. The society publishes peer-reviewed scientific journals, conference proceedings, monographs, tutorial texts, field guides, and reference volumes in print and online. SPIE is especially well-known for Photonics West, one of the laser and photonics industry's largest combined conferences and tradeshows which is held annually in San Francisco. SPIE also participates as partners in leading educational initiatives, and in 2020, for example, provided more than $5.8 million in support of optics education and outreach programs around the world.
In optics, a ray is an idealized geometrical model of light or other electromagnetic radiation, obtained by choosing a curve that is perpendicular to the wavefronts of the actual light, and that points in the direction of energy flow. Rays are used to model the propagation of light through an optical system, by dividing the real light field up into discrete rays that can be computationally propagated through the system by the techniques of ray tracing. This allows even very complex optical systems to be analyzed mathematically or simulated by computer. Ray tracing uses approximate solutions to Maxwell's equations that are valid as long as the light waves propagate through and around objects whose dimensions are much greater than the light's wavelength. Ray optics or geometrical optics does not describe phenomena such as diffraction, which require wave optics theory. Some wave phenomena such as interference can be modeled in limited circumstances by adding phase to the ray model.
Mehdi Vaez-Iravani is an Iranian scientist, engineer and inventor involved in the invention of "Shear-force microscopy".
Optical lens design is the process of designing a lens to meet a set of performance requirements and constraints, including cost and manufacturing limitations. Parameters include surface profile types, as well as radius of curvature, distance to the next surface, material type and optionally tilt and decenter. The process is computationally intensive, using ray tracing or other techniques to model how the lens affects light that passes through it.
Optical manufacturing and testing is the process of manufacturing and testing optical components. It spans a wide range of manufacturing procedures and optical test configurations.
Zerodur is a lithium-aluminosilicate glass-ceramic produced by Schott AG since 1968. It has been used for a number of very large telescope mirrors including GTC, Keck I, Keck II, and SOFIA, as well as some smaller telescopes. With its low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), it is suitable for producing mirrors that maintain acceptable figures in extremely cold environments, such as deep space. Although it has advantages for applications requiring a coefficient of thermal expansion less than that of borosilicate glass, it remains very expensive as compared to borosilicate. The tight tolerance on CTE, ±0.007×10−6 K−1, allows for its use in high-precision applications.
In optics the Lagrange invariant is a measure of the light propagating through an optical system. It is defined by
Spectral sensitivity is the relative efficiency of detection, of light or other signal, as a function of the frequency or wavelength of the signal.
Shearography or Speckle pattern shearing interferometry is a measuring and testing method similar to holographic interferometry. It uses coherent light or coherent soundwaves to provide information about the quality of different materials in nondestructive testing, strain measurement, and vibration analysis. Shearography is extensively used in production and development in aerospace, wind rotor blades, automotive, and materials research areas. Advantages of shearography are the large area testing capabilities, non-contact properties, its relative insensitivity to environmental disturbances, and its good performance on honeycomb materials, which is a big challenge for traditional nondestructive testing methods.
Claes-Göran Sture Granqvist is a materials physicist and Professor of Solid State Physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. Granqvist is considered a pioneer and expert in photochromic materials and energy-efficient building materials such as glass, paint, and wood.
Length measurement, distance measurement, or range measurement (ranging) refers to the many ways in which length, distance, or range can be measured. The most commonly used approaches are the rulers, followed by transit-time methods and the interferometer methods based upon the speed of light.
Hakeem Muata Oluseyi is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, inventor, educator, science communicator, author, actor, veteran, and humanitarian.
Anurag Sharma is an Indian physicist and a professor at the department of physics of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He is known for his pioneering researches on optoelectronics and optical communications and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Sciences, India as well as Indian National Academy of Engineering. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Engineering Sciences in 1998.
The I. I. Rabi Prize in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics is given by the American Physical Society to recognize outstanding work by mid-career researchers in the field of atomic, molecular, and optical physics. The award was endowed in 1989 in honor of the physicist I. I. Rabi and has been awarded biannually since 1991.
Kevin Rolland Thompson was the Group Director, Research and Development/Optics at Synopsys, Inc. His work contributed to developments in nanolithography, astrophysics and the advancement of optics
Jannick Rolland is the Brian J. Thompson Professor of Optical Engineering at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. She is also the co-founder and CTO of LighTopTech, a women-owner business founded in 2013 to create medical imaging technologies with biomimetic noninvasive imaging technology. At the University of Rochester, she is the Director of the NSF I/UCRC Center for Freeform Optics (CeFO). She is also the Director of the R.E. Hopkins Center for Optical Design and Engineering that engages undergraduates in optical design, fabrication, and metrology.
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