[دانه کولانه]

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.)

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.)

Commercial Wollaston prisms. The actual prim is held inside a cylindrical housing (Courtesy of Melles Griot)

A Soleile-Babinet compensator (Courtesy of Melles-Griot.)

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

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 Segrè Visual Archives, AIP.)

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.)

An 850 nm VCSEL diode.(Courtesy of Honeywell.)

A 1550 nm MQW-DFB InGaAsP laser diode pigtail-coupled to a fiber. (Courtesy of Alcatel.)

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.)

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.)