EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Stephen G. Anderson, SPIE;
Dan Botez, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Walter Burgess, Power
Technology; Connie Chang-Hasnain,
UC Berkeley Center for Opto-electronic
Nanostructured Semiconductor
Technologies; Pat Edsell, PLE
Consultants; Jason Eichenholz, Open
Photonics; Thomas Giallorenzi, Naval
Research Laboratory; Ron Gibbs, Ron
Gibbs Associates; Anthony M.
Johnson, Center for Advanced Studies
in Photonics Research, University of
Maryland Baltimore County;
Kenneth Kaufmann, Hamamatsu
Corp.; Larry Marshall, CSIRO;
Jan Melles, Photonics Investments;
Masahiro Joe Nagasawa, TEM Co. Ltd.;
David Richardson, University of
Southampton; Ralph A. Rotolante,
Vicon Infrared; Jeremy Govier,
Edmund Optics; Toby Strite,
IPG Photonics.
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Handcrafted photonics
In an age of mass production and consumption, many of us still value handmade, locally produced products and services, whether it’s beer, food, clothing, furniture, or homes. It may be a stretch to compare
an engineer or researcher working in photonics to the owner of your local brewpub—or maybe not.
Our features in this issue show clearly how photonics products and applications rely on individual
engineers and researchers to personally design, build, and use them. We start with articles describing
advances in complex yet core photonics products like optical tables (see page 27), polygon beam scanners (see page 31), UV laser sources (see page 37), and diffractive optical elements (see page 41). Components such as these are then crafted into unique systems that can perform truly marvelous applications such as spectroscopy for detecting brain cancer in situ during surgery (see page 46), or terahertz
imaging to determine the quality of agricultural and industrial products (see page 50).
And you certainly do not think that the dragonfly with a photonics-laden backpack on the cover
of this issue is somehow mass-produced. It was handcrafted by nature, as well as photonics engineers
and scientists at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (see page 7).
I sometimes wonder if the lifelong attraction that photonics holds for many of us relates not just to
fascination with the science and technology, but fundamentally to the very personal and satisfying nature of working with the very carefully thought-out and precise systems that we create.
