The birth of laser in the 1960s opened up a new era for optics. Many interesting laser applications arose ever since in subjects like nonlinear optics, holography, spectroscopy, and quantum optics [1-4]. Among those, ultrafast optics is an emerging area that frequently catches people’s attention. Ultrafast optics deals with short pulses in time scale ranging from picosecond down to attosecond, ...

In 1998 LEP will be run using an optics with phase advances P x 102° and P y 90° in the arc cells. This note summarises the main results from the optics evaluation procedure that is now routinely applied to new LEP optics. This includes the study of the orbits, optics and dynamic apertures of an ensemble of imperfect machines with corrections similar to those applied in operation. It provides p...

Time-reversal symmetry is important to optics. Optical processes can run in a forward or backward direction through time when such symmetry is preserved. In linear optics, a time-reversed process of laser emission can enable total absorption of coherent light fields inside an optical cavity of loss by time-reversing the original gain medium. Nonlinearity, however, can often destroy such symmetr...

The relationship between two different asymptotic techniques developed in order to describe the propagation of waves beyond the standard geometrical optics approximation, namely, the Wigner-Weyl kinetic formalism and the complex geometrical optics method, is addressed. More specifically, a solution of the wave kinetic equation, relevant to the Wigner-Weyl formalism, is obtained which yields the...

Photonic microsystems played an essential role in the development of integrated photonic devices, thanks to their unique spatiotemporal control and spectral shaping capabilities. Similar capabilities to markedly control and manipulate X-ray radiation are highly desirable but practically impossible due to the massive size of the silicon single-crystal optics currently used. Here we show that mic...

When compared to the Shack-Hartmann sensor, the image sharpness feedback method has the advantage of easy implementation in a closed-loop adaptive optics system. It also has the potential to be implemented as a smart sensor using VLSI technology. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive optics testbed that uses a CMOS sharpness imager built in the New Mexico State University (NMSU) Electro-op...

With the advent of Free Electron Lasers and general UV ultra-short, ultra-intense sources, optics needed to transport such radiation have evolved significantly to standard UV optics. Problems like surface damage, wavefront preservation, beam splitting, beam shaping, beam elongation (temporal stretching) pose new challenges for the design of beam transport systems. These problems lead to a new w...

This Applied Optics feature issue on Topics in Biomedical Optics highlights papers presented at the 2008 Biomedical Topical meeting sponsored by the Optical Society.