Next-Generation Cell Phone Cameras

The mobile camera market is being driven by consumers’ desire for big imaging capability in smaller and smaller packages. Despite the limitations imposed by these competing demands—or perhaps because of them—many companies are unleashing creative solutions that incorporate wafer-level optics, liquid lenses and LED flashes.

Recycled Fiber Optics: How Old Ideas Drove New Technology

When it comes to fiber optics, everything old is new again. Crucial building blocks of modern technology were once written off as impractical, including single-mode fiber and wavelength-division multiplexing. Now coherent communication systems, abandoned in the 1980s, have become cutting-edge high-performance systems.

High-Performance Sensing Using Fiber Lasers

Fiber laser sensors are capable of achieving fundamentally limited strain resolution. Their high sensitivity per unit length enables new sensing possibilities, miniaturization of existing sensors and simplification of sensing mechanisms.

OPN Talks with Greg Papadopoulos

Our conversation with Greg Papadopoulos, venture capitalist and OFC/NFOEC plenary speaker.

A Modest Proposal on the Evolution of the Eye

Is there an evolutionary link between the bony plates that surrounded the eyes of some prehistoric creatures and the iris as we know it today?

Deciphering Rogue Waves

A team of researchers from Spain, France and Brazil found a way to generate rogue waves and developed a model for understanding them as a result of a deterministic nonlinear process.

The History of OSA

Presidential profile: Karl Gunther Kessler and Walter Lewis Hyde.

Microring Resonator Comb Shapes Ultrashort Pulses

A team based at Purdue University has crafted a tiny, chip-sized ring resonator comb that generates shaped pulses.

Following Protein Folding

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (Germany) used single-molecule force spectroscopy with ultrastable optical tweezers to measure the length of a single protein and the force required to cause a change in the folding state.

Suppressing Spontaneous Emission Inside a Photonic Crystal

Scientists at the University of Twente (Netherlands) have demonstrated a prediction made nearly a quarter-century ago: that spontaneous emission of light can be inhibited within a 3-D photonic bandgap.

Book Reviews

Letters

2012 OSA Fellows

Sixty-six OSA members were recently elevated to the rank of Fellow.

OSA Today

President's Message