Photonics
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Photonics is the science of generating, controlling, and detecting photons, particularly in the visible and near infra-red spectrum, but also extending to the ultraviolet (0.20.35 µm wavelength), long-wave infrared (812 µm wavelength), and far-infrared/THz portion of the spectrum (e.g., 2-4 THz corresponding to 75150 µm wavelength) where today quantum cascade lasers are being actively developed. Photonics is an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s at General Electric, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, IBM, and RCA and made practical by Zhores Alferov and Dmitri Z. Garbuzov and collaborators working at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute and almost simultaneously by Izuo Hayashi and Mort Panish working at Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Just as applications of electronics have expanded dramatically since the first transistor was invented in 1948, the unique applications of photonics continue to emerge. Those which are established as economically important applications for semiconductor photonic devices include optical data recording, fiber optic telecommunications, laser printing (based on xerography), displays, and optical pumping of high-power lasers. The potential applications of photonics are virtually unlimited and include chemical synthesis, medical diagnostics, on-chip data communication, laser defense, and fusion energy, to name several interesting additional examples.
