Vibrations introduced into an isolated system via cabling are a common problem for sensitive instruments. Cables can carry vibrations from an auxiliary piece of equipment (such as a pump or fan) into the chassis of a sensitive instrument. Cables can also transmit noise — vibration, acoustic, or EMI — from walls, the ground, or other ambient sources. This is called parasitic noise. Parasitic … Continue reading
CO2 lasers and other mid-infrared light sources are proven tools for material inspection via spectroscopic techniques. Recently atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scattering scanning nearfield optical microscopy (s-SNOM) have gained traction due to their complementary setups. These techniques can provide insight to a material’s chemical composition and optical properties while providing imaging with a spatial resolution … Continue reading
One typical diffractive optical element (DOE) design is a laser beam shaper. There are two main types of this design: Analytical beam shaper (also called top-hat beam shaper or flat-top beam shaper) Diffractive homogenizer (also called diffractive diffuser) The analytical beam shaper modifies a highly coherent Gaussian incident beam (typically with M2 < 1.5) into … Continue reading
Increasing the number of parameters that can be measured with fluorescence imaging is a powerful means of increasing the information an experiment can provide. It also minimizes the number of experiments required to acquire a given amount of information. New, extremely bright fluorochromes of a new class of fluorescent molecule from BD Biosciences enables 5-color … Continue reading
Terahertz radiation shows strong dependence on water content. Also many gases, molecules, and solid-state samples exhibit a unique fingerprint in this frequency range. Therefore terahertz radiation is useful for biomedical imaging or gas sensing. Terahertz spectroscopy, based on asynchronous optical sampling (ASOPS), combines high data acquisition rates with simultaneous access to amplitude and phase information. This … Continue reading