Photonics Technologies: Applications in Petroleum Refining, Building Controls, Emergency Medicine, and Industrial Materials Analysis

摘要

Photonics is a class of enabling infrastructure technologies that promises broad economic benefits by bringing together technical advances from optics and electronics to develop high-performance manufacturing processes, ultra-high-sensitivity metrologies, and new products. Historically, U.S. photonics companies, despite a strong base in fundamental research and basic photonics technologies, tended to be financially successful when exceptional performance was critical and where market sizes were small. U.S. photonics companies are apt to be less successful when efficient mass production is required. Recognizing the potential for broad-based economic impact from reversing these tendencies, the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) has provided cost-sharing funding for more than 120 photonics projects from the time of its inception in the early 1990s.