Introduction

Abstract

Optical systems have, over the past 50 years, revolutionized the way we interact with information, and now have a wide range of uses in telecommunications, information display, and metrology. The advances in optical science at the beginning of the 20^th century laid the foundation for the understanding of optical particle and wave properties, and in the 1950’s the invention of the laser allowed, for the first time, practical commercial and industrial applications of coherent optical systems. Coupled with the advent of high-speed electronics that resulted from the invention of the transistor in the 1950’s and the need for high-speed communication resulting from rapid adoption of the high-volume, high-performance, low-cost silicon planar electronics manufacturing technologies, optical technologies began to revolutionize telecommunications and information transmittal in the 1980’s. Today fiber-optic systems can routinely transmit information at rates of more than a terahertz.