Applied Digital Optics: From Micro-optics to Nanophotonics

Foreword by Professor Joseph Goodman

The field of digital optics is relatively new, especially when compared with the centuries-long life of the more general field of optics. While it would perhaps have been possible to imagine this field a century or more ago, the concept would not have been of great interest, due to the lack of suitable sources, computing power and fabrication tools. But digital optics has now come of age, aided by the extraordinary advances in lasers, processor speed and the remarkable development of tools for fabricating such optics, driven in part by the tools of the semiconductor industry.

It was perhaps in the seminal work of Lohmann on computer-generated holograms that interest in the field of digital optics was launched. Lohmann based his experimental work on the use of binary plotters and photo-reduction, but today the plotting tools have reached a level of sophistication not even imagined at the time of Lohmann's invention, allowing elements with even sub-wavelength structure to be directly fabricated on a broad range of materials.

Applied Digital Optics is a remarkable compendium of concepts, techniques and applications of digital optics. The book includes in-depth discussions of guided-wave optics, refractive optics, diffractive optics and hybrid (diffractive/refractive) optics. Also included is the important area of ‘dynamic optics’, which covers devices with diffractive properties that can be changed at will. The optics of sub-wavelength structures ...