Photonics
An early instance of the word was in a December 1954 letter from John W. Campbell to Gotthard Gunther:Incidentally, I’ve decided to invent a new science — photonics.
Though coined earlier, the term photonics came into common use in the 1980s as fiber-optic data transmission was adopted by telecommunications network operators.
[citation needed] Its use was confirmed when the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society established an archival journal named Photonics Technology Letters at the end of the 1980s.
[citation needed] During the period leading up to the dot-com crash circa 2001, photonics was a field focused largely on optical telecommunications.
Classical optics long preceded the discovery that light is quantized, when Albert Einstein famously explained the photoelectric effect in 1905.
The term electro-optics came into earlier use and specifically encompasses nonlinear electrical-optical interactions applied, e.g., as bulk crystal modulators such as the Pockels cell, but also includes advanced imaging sensors.
An important aspect in the modern definition of Photonics is that there is not necessarily a widespread agreement in the perception of the field boundaries.
In practice, as the field evolves, evidences that "modern optics" and Photonics are often used interchangeably are very diffused and absorbed in the scientific jargon.
Included are all areas from everyday life to the most advanced science, e.g. light detection, telecommunications, information processing, photovoltaics, photonic computing, lighting, metrology, spectroscopy, holography, medicine (surgery, vision correction, endoscopy, health monitoring), biophotonics, military technology, laser material processing, art diagnostics (involving infrared reflectography, X-rays, ultraviolet fluorescence, XRF), agriculture, and robotics.
The potential applications of photonics are virtually unlimited and include chemical synthesis, medical diagnostics, on-chip data communication, sensors, laser defense, and fusion energy, to name several interesting additional examples.
A very advanced research topic within photonics is the investigation and fabrication of special structures and "materials" with engineered optical properties.
Photodetectors range from very fast photodiodes for communications applications over medium speed charge coupled devices (CCDs) for digital cameras to very slow solar cells that are used for energy harvesting from sunlight.
In the last years more advanced modulation formats like phase-shift keying or even orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing have been investigated to counteract effects like dispersion that degrade the quality of the transmitted signal.
Biophotonics mainly focuses on improving medical diagnostic abilities (for example for cancer or infectious diseases)[14] but can also be used for environmental or other applications.
