Scan Mirrors In Industrial Welding
Industrial Welding: Enhancing Scanning Mirror PerformanceThis is our last entry in the scanning mirrors series. In this article, we focus on the use of scanning mirrors in industrial welding environments. As you can imagine, not only do the optical requirements differ from those of a scanning microscope, but the mechanical demands also change significantly due […]
Steering Mirrors In LIDAR Systems
This is our third installment of a four-series blogs about steering mirrors. We have talked previously about steering mirrors in laser markings and steering mirrors in OCT systems. This week, we will talk about the steering mirror requirements for those in LIDAR systems. In the past we, have talked about the lens design in LIDAR […]
OCT Solutions: Unlocking the Power of Steering Mirrors
This week, we will continue our discussion of fast steering mirrors. If you missed our last article, go ahead and read about steering mirrors for laser marking. Here, we will discuss the design requirements for steering mirrors in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). If you are not familiar with scanning microscopy (the basis of OCT), please […]
Beam Splitters: Explained
Beam splitters are a fundamental element in optical systems. Beam splitters are, in essence, optical components used to divide a single light source (usually a laser) into two separate beams. The more common kind of beam splitters (the kind that you can find in most colleges or labs) is a beam splitter that can split […]
Calcium Fluoride Glass: An Overview
The choice of glass is a fundamental part in the optical design process. This is especially true for IR and thermal optics materials. In this article, we will review Calcium Fluoride (CaF2), an interesting glass that has a wide range of applications. Before we start, let’s look at the transmission window for CaF2 (Figure 1). […]
Understanding objective lenses
Introduction In previous entries, we have talked about the design of scanning microscopes, infinity corrected microscopes, confocal microscope design, and Koehler illumination systems-a common illumination system in microscopes. The most essential microscope element in a borescope design is the objective lens. Microscope objective lenses are a crucial part of a microscope, responsible for magnifying the […]