Applied Digital Optics: From Micro-optics to Nanophotonics

Foreword by Professor Trevor Hall

It was my privilege to host Bernard Kress at an early stage in his career. I was very impressed by his creativity, determination and tireless energy. I knew then that he would become a champion in his field of diffractive optics.

Applied Digital Optics is the second book written by Bernard and Professor Patrick Meyrueis from the Photonics Systems Laboratory (LSP) at Université de Strasbourg (UdS) in France. While their first book, Digital Diffractive Optics, was solely dedicated to diffractive optics, this one covers a much wider range of fields associated with digital optics, namely: waveguide optics, refractive micro-optics, hybrid optics, optical MEMS and switchable optics, holographic and diffractive optics, photonic crystals, plasmonics and metamaterials. Thus, the book's subtitle, From Micro-optics to Nanophotonics, is indeed a faithful description of its broad contents. After reviewing these optical elements throughout the first chapters, emphasis is set on the numerical modeling techniques used in industry and research to design and model such elements. The last chapters describe in detail the state of the art in micro-fabrication techniques and technologies, and review an impressive list of applications using such optics in industry today.

Professors Kress and Meyrueis have been investigating the field of digital optics at LSP since the late 1980s, when photonics was still struggling to become a fully recognized field, like electronics ...