Photonics

Photonics is the generation, transmission, emission, modulation, switching and detection of light and utilization of light and other electromagnetic radiation. Photonics offers solutions to the global challenges of our time.  Apart from this, photonics includes all applications of light across the spectrum, ranging from ultraviolet to visible light. Photonics finds application across various application segments including consumer electronics, displays, safety and defense technology, communication, metrology and sensing among others. Additionally, photonics also finds application across medical and health care, and the high performance computing segment. Medical and healthcare is one of the fastest growing application segments for photonics based instruments. The term photonics developed as an outgrowth of the first practical semiconductor light emitters invented in the early 1960s and optical fibers developed in the 1970s.

Wave guides, optical modulators, optical interconnects, LED, wavelength division multiplexer filters, photo detectors, lasers, amplifiers and spectroscopes among others are the major products of photonics. The prices of photonics based equipment are less compared to conventional devices. Lower power consumption and need for high-speed electronics are the major factors fuelling the demand for photonics. Wavelength division multiplexer filter is one of the major products for photonics. Increasing demand for high speed communication is one of the major factors fueling the demand for wavelength division multiplexers.

(Ref: Quora )

Photonics is closely related to optics, quantum optics, optomechanics, electro-optics, optoelectronics and quantum electronics. Classical optics long preceded the discovery that light is quantized, when Albert Einstein famously explained the photoelectric effect in 1905. Optics tools include the refracting lens, the reflecting mirror, and various optical components and instruments. Key tenets of classical optics, such as Huygens Principle, Maxwell's Equations and the wave equations, do not depend on quantum properties of light. However, each area has slightly different connotations by scientific and government communities and in the marketplace. Quantum optics often connotes fundamental research, whereas photonics is used to connote applied research and development.

Photonics also relates to the emerging science of quantum information, in those cases where it employs photonic methods. Other emerging fields  include opto-atomics, in which devices integrate both photonic and  atomic devices for applications such as precision timekeeping,  navigation, and metrology; polaritonics, which differs from photonics in that the fundamental information carrier is a polariton, which is a mixture of photons and phonons, and operates in the range of frequencies from 300 gigahertz to approximately 10 terahertz.

(Ref: Shashank Rai )