Fast Electrically Focus Tunable Lens

When you are reading this post, when you are looking around, your eyes will automatically focus on the spot by reshaping our eye lens. With glass lenses as used in optics, you can achieve that only with moving a lens-system back and forward.

Optotune has introduced now a commercial tunable lens which reshapes its surface and allows continuously focusing between 20mm to 120mm by an external voltage. In the manual version you can even go from -40mm to 40mm, so from concave to convex!




This could find applications in material processing, ophthalmology or microscopy. For further applications have a look at their application homepage

Interesting is also the microscopy application:



Have fun!

Wavelength Conversion Calculator

APE (standing for Angewandte Physik & Elektronik GmbH, a german company in Berlin) has a nice small (and free) wavelength converter on their homepage. It allows you to directly calculate the sum frequency and difference frequency generation, the wavelengths relations in an optical parameteric oscillator (OPO) as well as in coherent anti-stokes Raman scattering (CARS) spectroscopy. Furtermore, the conversion between wavelength, wavenumber, and frequency as well as different characterizations of pulses (dispersion) can be calculated.

The calculator page is in english and very userfriendly. Enjoy.

Prism Awards 2011

The finalists for the prism awards for photonic innovations by the SPIE has been anounced:

Finalists Prism Awards

Take the time to look at the finalists in the 9 different categories. The awards will be presented at the next SPIE Photonics West in January.

Video Showing the Inside of a Ti:Sa Laser

I was quite surprised to find such a video showing in detail a titanium saphire laser from a company. Let's see how long it stays at youtube ;) .



Have fun watching it!

SWAMP OPTICS... & lectures

The ones of you working in the field of ultrafast lasers know what I mean with Swamp Optics, for the other ones it is a company for ultrashor laser pulse measurements. SWAMP Optics was founded by Rick Trebino, the inventor of FROG and GRENOUILLE (which is french and means frog). As you imagine, FROG and GRENOUILLE stands for some types of pulse measurement devices... and their strongest competitor is the SPIDER. Well well... Recently I got aware that SWAMP also stands for something, namely "simply wonderful apparatus for measuring pulses"...

Aside from that, the homepage includes a real good choice of tutorials about pulse measurement devices: Swamp optics Tutorials and also the lectures from Prof. Trebino are available: lecture files. It is really worth to read it. Have fun!

Seen in twitter.

"We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here" said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar."

Jokes are coming out in reaction to the announcement of CERN that they have found neutrinos that travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein theories have been challenged several times, but the theory always proved to be right, so we'll wait a bot, before changing our courses.

InTech - Open access publisher of Scientific Books and Journals

Founded in 2004, InTech is a open access book (and some journals) publisher covering the field of science and technology. Since then, they have published already over 550 books with over 2.5 millions of downloads (counting the chapter downloads). In 2010 its publishing program was expanded into the field of medecine.

Concerning the field of Optics and Lasers, 16 books have been published so far. Although the titles of the books sounds general, the chapters are already dedicated to a specific research topic, which makes it not very suitable for non-expert who are looking for an overview or introduction. However, if you work in the same field, it is probably worth to have a look into it.