When astronomers talk about an optical telescope, they often mention the size of its mirror. That's because the larger your mirror, the sharper your view of the heavens can be. It's known as resolving ...

Interferometry basics Three principle values describe any wave: amplitude, frequency, and phase. In fact, the basic equation for a sinusoid of frequency (ω) or period (2π/ ω) is: f (t) = A cos (ω t + ...

White light interferometry (WLI) is a contact-free optical method for measuring surface height. It uses the phase difference between the light reflected off a reference mirror and the target sample to ...

Fringe conference can be traced to the automatic processing of fringe patterns. The term “patterns” evokes an image of flowing lines elegantly wrapped around surface contours. However, automatic ...

Warming up: illustration of the interferometer. (Courtesy: APS / Alan Stonebreaker) An atom interferometer that does not have to be cooled to cryognenic temperatures has been created by physicists in ...

Accurately controlling film thickness and uniformity is extremely important for both throughput and performance in the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, medical, and research industries. White ...

Phase-sensitive coherent imaging exploits changes in the phases of backscattered light to observe tiny alterations of scattering structures or variations of the refractive index. But moving scatterers ...

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) provide extremely bright and highly spatially coherent x-ray radiation with femtosecond pulse duration. Currently, they are widely used in biology and material ...