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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]
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. [1] Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light.
Glass fiber or plastic optical fiber can be used to guide the light along a desired path. In optical communications optical fibers allow for transmission distances of more than 100 km without amplification depending on the bit rate and modulation format used for transmission. A very advanced research topic within photonics is the investigation ...
Optical computing or photonic computing uses light waves produced by lasers or incoherent sources for data processing, data storage or data communication for computing.For decades, photons have shown promise to enable a higher bandwidth than the electrons used in conventional computers (see optical fibers).
Free-space optical communication (FSO) is an optical communication technology that uses light propagating in free space to wirelessly transmit data for telecommunications or computer networking. "Free space" means air, outer space, vacuum, or something similar. This contrasts with using solids such as optical fiber cable.
The fourth generation of fiber-optic communication systems used optical amplification to reduce the need for repeaters and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) to increase data capacity. The introduction of WDM was the start of optical networking, as WDM became the technology of choice for fiber-optic bandwidth expansion. [24]
Optoelectronic devices are electrical-to-optical or optical-to-electrical transducers, or instruments that use such devices in their operation. [ 1 ] Electro-optics is often erroneously used as a synonym, but is a wider branch of physics that concerns all interactions between light and electric fields , whether or not they form part of an ...
Beyond this power threshold there are thermal issues related to the optics that separate these lasers from their lower-power counterparts. [11] Laser systems in the 50-300W range are used primarily for pumping, plastic welding and soldering applications. Lasers above 300W are used in brazing, thin metal welding, and sheet metal cutting ...