420 North Bonita Avenue | Tucson, Arizona 85745
520.884.8821 | info@specinst.com | specinst.com
Meet us and learn more
at Photonics West, Booth 3050
Spectral Instruments is known for the manufacture of ultra sensitive cameras
and extend that technology into our production scale products.
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imaging and measurement systems
Contact us today to learn how we can provide the solution for your
OEM camera needs at 520-884-8821 or info@specinst.com
20th Anniversary
1993-2013
Ultra Sensitive Cooled CCD Cameras for OEM
f1( y)
df1( y) ––––– dy
standards. Thin-film coatings can pro-
vide that stability, and can be made on a
micrometer scale for microscopic imag-
ing. In 2014, DataColor (Lawrenceville,
NJ) introduced a series of thin-film calibration color slides called ChromaCal.
Metamaterials and the future
The allure of metamaterials is their tremendous potential for building optical
materials to order, with otherwise unobtainable properties. Optical metamaterials remain in the laboratory stage, but
two invited talks at the December 2014
Materials Research Society (MRS) meet-
ing in Boston gave exciting visions of
the future.
In the first talk, Nader Enghata of the
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)
said an impressive array of applications
have already been demonstrated, includ-
ing cloaking, superlenses, ultra-thin cavi-
ties, transformation optics, and metasur-
faces. Then he went further. “Imagine a
metamaterial that computes [see Fig 5].
Could we design a material to get a deriv-
ative or an integral of a wave that you put
into it?” He has been exploring the possibilities of optical “metatronics,” metamaterials that conduct current and integrate optical and electronic functions,
and his group is attempting to use one to
take the second derivative of an input signal. In the long term, the group envisions
an optical computational feedback loop.
In a second invited talk, Kevin
MacDonald of the University of
Southampton (England) argued for mov-
ing beyond widely used metallic meta-
materials. “We can do better with all di-
electric opto-mechanical metamaterials;
we want to avoid losses associated with
metals and create much stronger optical
forces between resonators,” he told the
MRS meeting. He also envisioned mov-
ing beyond today’s static metamaterials
to active metadevices, and perhaps ulti-
mately to metastructures that could be
reconfigured by changing the applied
electromagnetic field.
How many of these bright visions are
attainable in the next half-century? If
the past is any lesson, we overrate some
ideas and are surprised by some unexpected successes. But we can safely say
that the future of optical components is
not likely to be a sleepy backwater.
Tell us what you think about this article. Send an
e-mail to LFWFeedback@pennwell.com.
FIGURE 5. Metamaterial manipulates light
waves for computation. (Courtesy of the
University of Pennsylvania)
