Health & Medical Eye Health & Optical & Vision

Optical Components Industry: Current Trends, Resurgence And Way Forward

Optics as a separate branch began with the development of lenses by the ancient Egyptians. The earliest known lenses were made from polished crystal, often quartz, dating as early as 700 BC.
Today, Optics with both its branches of Physical Optics and Geometrical Optics is used to solve complex optical problems involving reflections, refractions and polarizations. There are many companies today offering optical solutions with high precision optical products like prisms, lenses, polarizer and mirrors.
These products are called optical components and they include product lines such as coatings, mirrors, lenses, laser windows, optical prisms, polarizing optics, UV and IR optics, optical filters, etc.

Complete assortment of such components enables to find solution for various laser applications. These can be customized based on a clients requirement.

In optics, a prism is a transparent optical element with flat, polished surface to refract light. While the angles between surfaces depend on application, exactly two of the surfaces must have an angle.

Right angle prism , the most popular of all prisms is used to deviate beam through 90, when beam enters normal to right sides, and as also a retro reflector to deviate beam through 180 when it enters from normal side to the hypotenuse.
It is a triangular prism and may have customized reflector coatings or protected aluminum coating, depending on the requirement.

A cylindrical lens focuses light that passes through on to a line. As opposed to a spherical lens, which focuses light on to a point, cylindrical lenses are used to focus the image passing through it onto a line parallel to the intersection of the surface of the lens and a plane tangent to it.

These types of lenses are of two kinds- convex and concave. Cylindrical lenses find their applications in their use to correct ocular astigmatism, as also in solar water heating installations.

The Optical Components industry today is undergoing consolidation with infrastructure investments injecting growth and profit. In recent years the industry has moved from direct detection to coherent transmission and has alighted on a flexible ROADM architecture resulting in a new level of optical networking sophistication.

The way forward for Optical players is to work harder to develop components to meet the rapid demand with denser insights and improved cost-benefit ratios.

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