Optoelectronics Photographs from Textbook

 

 

Chapter 1

Augustin Jean Fresnel (1788 - 1827) was a French physicist, and a civil engineer for the French government, who was one of the principal proponents of the wave theory of light. He made a number of distinct contributions to optics including the well-known Fresnel lens that was used in light houses in the 19th century. He fell out with Napoleon in 1815 and was subsequently put into house-arrest until the end of Napoleon's reign. During his enforced leisure time he formulated his wave ideas of light into a mathematical theory. (Photo: Smithsonian Institution, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives.)
David Brewster (1781-1868), a British physicist, formulated the polarization law in 1815. (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives, Zeleny Collection.)
Charles Fabry (1867-1945), left, and Alfred Perot (1863-1925),right, were the first French physicists to construct an optical cavity for interferometry (Fabry: AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives, E. Scott Barr Collection; Perot: The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 64, November 1926, p.208.)
Beam splitter cubes (Courtesy of Melles Griot)
William Lawrence Bragg (1890-1971), Australian born British physicist, won the Nobel prize with his father William Henry Bragg for his "famous equation" when he was only 25 years old (Courtesy of Emilio Segrč Visual Archives, AIP, Weber Collection)

 

Chapter 2

Professor Charles Kao who has been recognized as the inventor of fiber optics is receiving an IEE prize from Professor John Midwinter (1998 at IEE Savoy Place, London, UK; courtesy of IEE)
Reeled optical fibers on a drum. (Courtesy of Corning.)
Lord Ravleigh (John William Strutt) was an English physicist (1877 - 1919) and a Nobel Laureate (1904) who made a number of contributions to wave physics of sound and optics. (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives. Physics Today Collection)
Left: The soot rod fed into the consolidation furnace for sintering. Right: Glass preform fed into the fiber drawing furnace. (Courtesy of Corning.)
GRIN rod lenses and a spherical lens (a ball lens) used in coupling light into fibers. (Courtesy of Melles Griot)
John Tyndall in 1854 demonstrated to the Royal Institution that a water jet can act as a light guide (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives, Zeleny Collection.)

 

Chapter 3

William Shockley, (seated), John Bardeen (left) and Walter Brattain (right) invented the transistor at Bell Labs and thereby ushered in a new era of semiconductor devices. The three inventors shared the Nobel prize in 1956. (Courtesy of Bell Laboratories.)

 

Chapter 4

Ali Javan and his associates William Bennett Jr. and Donald Herriott at Bell Labs were first to successfully demonstrate a continuous wave (cw) helium-neon laser operation (1960-1962). (Courtesy of Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies.)
Theodore Harold Maiman was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, son of an electrical engineer. He studied engineering physics at Colorado University, while repairing electrical appliances to pay for college, and then obtained a Ph.D. from Stanford. Theodore Maiman constructed this first laser in 1960 while working at Hughes Research Laboratories (T.H. Maiman, "Stimulated optical radiation in ruby lasers", Nature, 187, 493, 1960). There is a vertical chromium ion doped ruby rod in the center of a helical xenon flash tube. The ruby rod has mirrored ends. The xenon flash provides optical pumping of the chromium ions in the ruby rod. The output is a pulse of red laser light. (Courtesy of HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, California.)
A modern stabilized compact He-Ne laser. (Courtesy of Melles Griot.)
A laser diode pigtailed to a fiber. Two of the leads are for a back-facet photodetector to allow the monitoring of the laser output power.(Courtesy of Alcatel)
A 1550 nm MQW-DFB InGaAsP laser diode pigtail-coupled to a fiber. (Courtesy of Alcatel.)
An 850 nm VCSEL diode.(Courtesy of Honeywell.)
SEM (scanning electron microscope) of the first low-threshold VCSELs developed at Bell Laboratories in 1989. The largest device area is 5 µm in diameter (Courtesy of Dr. Axel Scherer Caltech.)
A 1550 nm semiconductor optical amplifier using a InGaAsP chip. (Courtesy of Alcatel)
Dennis Gabor (1900 - 1979), inventor of holography, is standing next to his holographic portrait. Professor Gabor was a Hungarian born British physicist who published his holography invention in Nature in 1948 while he as at Thomson-Houston Co. Ltd, at a time when coherent light from lasers was not yet available. He was subsequently a professor of applied electron physics at Imperial College, University of London. (From M.D.E.C. Photo Lab, Courtesy AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives, AIP.)
The patent for the invention of the laser by Charles H. Townes and Arthur L. Schawlow in 1960 (Courtesy of Bell Laboratories). The laser patent was later bitterly disputed for almost three decades in “the patent wars” by Gordon Gould, an American physicist, and his designated agents. Gordon Gould eventually received the US patent for optical pumping of the laser in 1977 since the original laser patent did not detail such a pumping procedure. In 1987 he also received a patent for the gas discharge laser, thereby winning his 30 year patent war. His original notebook even contained the word “laser”. (See “Winning the laser-patent war", Jeff Hecht, Laser Focus World, December 1994, pp. 49-51).

 

Chapter 5

A selection of commercial InGaAs based photodetectors, including fiber-pigtailed photodiodes. (Courtesy of Fermionics, California.)

 

Chapter 6

Honda's two seated Dream car is powered by photovoltaics. The Honda Dream was first to finish 3,010 km in four days in the 1996 World Solar Challenge. (Courtesy of Photovoltaics Special Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)
Silicon solar cells on a house roof. (Courtesy of Mobil.)

 

Chapter 7

Sailors visiting Iceland during the 17th century brought back to Europe calcite crystals (Iceland spar) which had the unusual property of showing double images when objects were viewed through it. Erasmus Bartholinus described this property as the effect of double refraction and later Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695), a Dutch physicist, explained this double refraction in terms of ordinary and extraordinary waves. Christiaan Huygens made many contributions to optics and wrote prolifically on the subject. (Courtesy of AIP Emilo Segrč Visual Archives.)
A line viewed through a cubic sodium chloride (halite) crystal (optically isotropic) and a calcite crystal (optically anisotropic).
Two polaroid analyzers are placed with their transmission axes, along the long edges, at right angles to each other. The ordinary ray, undeflected, goes through the left polarizer whereas the extraordinary wave, deflected, goes through the right polarizer. The two waves therefore have orthogonal polarizations.
A Soleile-Babinet compensator (Courtesy of Melles-Griot.)
Commercial Wollaston prisms. The actual prim is held inside a cylindrical housing (Courtesy of Melles Griot)
Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels (1865 - 1913) son of Captain Theodore Pockels and Alwine Becker, was born in Vincenza (Italy). He obtained his doctorate from Göttingen University in 1888. From 1900 until 1913, he was a professor of theoretical physics in the Faculty of Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Heidelberg where he carried out extensive studies on electro-optic properties of crystals - the Pockels effect is basis of many practical electro-optic modulators (Courtesy of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Heidelberg, Germany.)
Ti diffused lithium niobate electro-optic (Pockels effect) modulators for use in high-speed optical fiber communications up to 16 GHz. Operates at 1550 nm. Maximum modulation voltage is 20V. (Courtesy of Lucent Technologies.)
Faraday effect optical isolators: Air-path isolators (top) and laser diode-to-filter isolator (below). The cylindrical case contains a rare-earth magnet. (Courtesy of OFR.)
Michael Faraday (English physicist, 1791 - 1867) (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrč Visual Archives, Zeleny Collection.)