Photographs

Posted on 2016-04-04 as part of the Photonics Spotlight (available as e-mail newsletter!)

Permanent link: https://www.rp-photonics.com/spotlight_2016_04_04.html

Author: Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta, RP Photonics AG, RP Photonics AG

Abstract: We encourage researchers and company people to provide photographs, drawings and videos for use in our Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology. Readers like that, and the contributors obtain a fair recognition.

Today I would like to make you aware of the possibility to contribute photographs, drawings and videos to the Encyclopedia of Laser Physics and Technology. Most illustrations there have been made by ourselves, but we have limited opportunities for making nice photographs of components and laser systems, for example. Therefore, we are happy to publish photographs and videos provided by others – for example, by researchers and laser companies.

In the following, I summarize the conditions:

Any materials should be such that contribute to the technical understanding of the relevant matter and do not primarily have an advertising character. Therefore, we do not accept images which dominantly shows things like company logos rather than relevant technical details.
In the figure caption, we always properly acknowledge the source of the materials. We may write something like “The photograph was kindly provided by Daniel Stepper from the Next Step Photonics Institute”, where the person and/or institute name may be equipped with an html link (with nofollow tag, i.e., directing people but not search engines to your website).
There is no money involved. You will neither have to pay for getting some publicity, nor will we pay you for providing the materials. That keeps things really simple.
You must of course make sure that no copyright or similar is violated.

Some ideas for suitable materials:

We can use photographs of optical components, setups containing multiple components and fabrication equipment.
There are also beautiful things like microscope images, showing an example of what can be achieved with a certain technique.
Technical drawings can also be very useful. For example, I could imagine a drawing which illustrates the operation principle of a WDM communications system or the structure of a semiconductor optical amplifier.
Videos are welcome. As an example, see our encyclopedia article on thin-disk lasers, where we have published a video which nicely illustrates the operation principle of such a laser. In particular, you can see there how one can realize a large number of passes of the pump radiation through the disk, using only a few relatively simple optical components. Our article on Q switching contains another video, illustrating how that method works.

Such cooperations really create a lot of benefits:

Our readers are of course happy to obtain not only good explanations in words, but also beautiful and helpful images.
We at RP Photonics are glad to keep our large user community very happy. We indirectly profit from the enormous popularity of our resource, including not only the encyclopedia but also the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide.
As a contributor of such materials, you can also obtain some fair recognition.

So I will be glad to receive your suggestions for the publication of such materials!

This article is a posting of the Photonics Spotlight, authored by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta. You may link to this page and cite it, because its location is permanent. See also the RP Photonics Encyclopedia.

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