Building Electro-Optical Systems E-Book

Philip C. D. Hobbs

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Wiley Series in Pure and Applied Optics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1805

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Praise for the First Edition "Now a new laboratory bible for optics researchers has joined the list: it is Phil Hobbs's Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work." --Tony Siegman, Optics & Photonics News Building a modern electro-optical instrument may be the most interdisciplinary job in all of engineering. Be it a DVD player or a laboratory one-off, it involves physics, electrical engineering, optical engineering, and computer science interacting in complex ways. This book will help all kinds of technical people sort through the complexity and build electro-optical systems that just work, with maximum insight and minimum trial and error. Written in an engaging and conversational style, this Second Edition has been updated and expanded over the previous edition to reflect technical advances and a great many conversations with working designers. Key features of this new edition include: * Expanded coverage of detectors, lasers, photon budgets, signal processing scheme planning, and front ends * Coverage of everything from basic theory and measurement principles to design debugging and integration of optical and electronic systems * Supplementary material is available on an ftp site, including an additional chapter on thermal Control and Chapter problems highly relevant to real-world design * Extensive coverage of high performance optical detection and laser noise cancellation Each chapter is full of useful lore from the author's years of experience building advanced instruments. For more background, an appendix lists 100 good books in all relevant areas, introductory as well as advanced. Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work, Second Edition is essential reading for researchers, students, and professionals who have systems to build.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1 Basic Optical Calculations

1.1 INTRODUCTION

1.2 WAVE PROPAGATION

1.3 CALCULATING WAVE PROPAGATION IN REAL LIFE

1.4 DETECTION

1.5 COHERENT DETECTION

1.6 INTERFEROMETERS

1.7 PHOTON BUDGETS AND OPERATING SPECIFICATIONS

1.8 SIGNAL PROCESSING STRATEGY

CHAPTER 2 Sources and Illuminators

2.1 INTRODUCTION

2.2 THE SPECTRUM

2.3 RADIOMETRY

2.4 CONTINUUM SOURCES

2.5 INTERLUDE: COHERENCE

2.6 MORE SOURCES

2.7 INCOHERENT LINE SOURCES

2.8 USING LOW COHERENCE SOURCES: CONDENSERS

2.9 LASERS

2.10 GAS LASERS

2.11 SOLID STATE LASERS

2.12 DIODE LASERS

2.13 LASER NOISE

2.14 DIODE LASER COHERENCE CONTROL

CHAPTER 3 Optical Detection

3.1 INTRODUCTION

3.2 PHOTODETECTION IN SEMICONDUCTORS

3.3 SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIOS

3.4 DETECTOR FIGURES OF MERIT

3.5 QUANTUM DETECTORS

3.6 QUANTUM DETECTORS WITH GAIN

3.7 THERMAL DETECTORS

3.8 IMAGE INTENSIFIERS

3.9 SILICON ARRAY SENSORS

3.10 HOW DO I KNOW WHICH NOISE SOURCE DOMINATES?

3.11 HACKS

CHAPTER 4 Lenses, Prisms, and Mirrors

4.1 INTRODUCTION

4.2 OPTICAL MATERIALS

4.3 LIGHT TRANSMISSION

4.4 SURFACE QUALITY

4.5 WINDOWS

4.6 PATHOLOGIES OF OPTICAL ELEMENTS

4.7 FRINGES

4.8 MIRRORS

4.9 GLASS PRISMS

4.10 PRISM PATHOLOGIES

4.11 LENSES

4.12 COMPLEX LENSES

4.13 OTHER LENS-LIKE DEVICES

CHAPTER 5 Coatings, Filters, and Surface Finishes

5.1 INTRODUCTION

5.2 METAL MIRRORS

5.3 TRANSMISSIVE OPTICAL COATINGS

5.4 SIMPLE COATING THEORY

5.5 ABSORPTIVE FILTERS

5.6 BEAM DUMPS AND BAFFLES

5.7 WHITE SURFACES AND DIFFUSERS

CHAPTER 6 Polarization

6.1 INTRODUCTION

6.2 POLARIZATION OF LIGHT

6.3 INTERACTION OF POLARIZATION WITH MATERIALS

6.4 ABSORPTION POLARIZERS

6.5 BREWSTER POLARIZERS

6.6 BIREFRINGENT POLARIZERS

6.7 DOUBLE-REFRACTION POLARIZERS

6.8 TIR POLARIZERS

6.9 RETARDERS

6.10 POLARIZATION CONTROL

CHAPTER 7 Exotic Optical Components

7.1 INTRODUCTION

7.2 GRATINGS

7.3 GRATING PATHOLOGIES

7.4 TYPES OF GRATINGS

7.5 RESOLUTION OF GRATING INSTRUMENTS

7.6 FINE POINTS OF GRATINGS

7.7 HOLOGRAPHIC OPTICAL ELEMENTS

7.8 RETROREFLECTIVE MATERIALS

7.9 SCANNERS

7.10 MODULATORS

CHAPTER 8 Fiber Optics

8.1 INTRODUCTION

8.2 FIBER CHARACTERISTICS

8.3 FIBER THEORY

8.4 FIBER TYPES

8.5 OTHER FIBER PROPERTIES

8.6 WORKING WITH FIBERS

8.7 FIBER DEVICES

8.8 DIODE LASERS AND FIBER OPTICS

8.9 FIBER OPTIC SENSORS

8.10 INTENSITY SENSORS

8.11 SPECTRALLY ENCODED SENSORS

8.12 POLARIMETRIC SENSORS

8.13 FIBER INTERFEROMETERS

8.14 TWO-BEAM FIBER INTERFEROMETERS

8.15 MULTIPLE-BEAM FIBER INTERFEROMETERS

8.16 PHASE AND POLARIZATION STABILIZATION

8.17 MULTIPLEXING AND SMART STRUCTURES

8.18 FIBER SENSOR HYPE

CHAPTER 9 Optical Systems

9.1 INTRODUCTION

9.2 WHAT EXACTLY DOES A LENS DO?

9.3 DIFFRACTION

9.4 ABERRATIONS

9.5 REPRESENTING ABERRATIONS

9.6 OPTICAL DESIGN ADVICE

9.7 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

9.8 ILLUMINATORS

CHAPTER 10 Optical Measurements

10.1 INTRODUCTION

10.2 GRASS ON THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

10.3 DETECTION ISSUES: WHEN EXACTLY IS BACKGROUND BAD?

10.4 MEASURE THE RIGHT THING

10.5 GETTING MORE SIGNAL PHOTONS

10.6 REDUCING THE BACKGROUND FLUCTUATIONS

10.7 OPTICALLY ZERO BACKGROUND MEASUREMENTS

10.8 ELECTRONICALLY ZERO BACKGROUND MEASUREMENTS

10.9 LABELING SIGNAL PHOTONS

10.10 CLOSURE

CHAPTER 11 Designing Electro-Optical Systems

11.1 INTRODUCTION

11.2 DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THIS?

11.3 VERY BASIC MARKETING

11.4 CLASSES OF MEASUREMENT

11.5 TECHNICAL TASTE

11.6 INSTRUMENT DESIGN

11.7 GUIDING PRINCIPLES

11.8 DESIGN FOR ALIGNMENT

11.9 TURNING A PROTOTYPE INTO A PRODUCT

CHAPTER 12 Building Optical Systems

12.1 INTRODUCTION

12.2 BUILD WHAT YOU DESIGNED

12.3 ASSEMBLING LAB SYSTEMS

12.4 ALIGNMENT AND TESTING

12.5 OPTICAL ASSEMBLY AND ALIGNMENT PHILOSOPHY

12.6 COLLIMATING BEAMS

12.7 FOCUSING

12.8 ALIGNING BEAMS WITH OTHER BEAMS

12.9 ADVANCED TWEAKING

12.10 ALIGNING LASER SYSTEMS

12.11 ADHESIVES

12.12 CLEANING

12.13 ENVIRONMENTAL CONSIDERATIONS

CHAPTER 13 Signal Processing

13.1 INTRODUCTION

13.2 ANALOG SIGNAL PROCESSING THEORY

13.3 MODULATION AND DEMODULATION

13.4 AMPLIFIERS

13.5 DEPARTURES FROM LINEARITY

13.6 NOISE AND INTERFERENCE

13.7 FREQUENCY CONVERSION

13.8 FILTERING

13.9 SIGNAL DETECTION

13.10 REDUCING INTERFERENCE AND NOISE

13.11 DATA ACQUISITION AND CONTROL

CHAPTER 14 Electronic Building Blocks

14.1 INTRODUCTION

14.2 RESISTORS

14.3 CAPACITORS

14.4 TRANSMISSION LINES

14.5 TRANSMISSION LINE DEVICES

14.6 DIODES AND TRANSISTORS

14.7 SIGNAL PROCESSING COMPONENTS

14.8 DIGITIZERS

14.9 ANALOG BEHAVIOR OF DIGITAL CIRCUITS

CHAPTER 15 Electronic Subsystem Design

15.1 INTRODUCTION

15.2 DESIGN APPROACHES

15.3 PERFECTION

15.4 FEEDBACK LOOPS

15.5 SIGNAL DETECTORS

15.6 PHASE-LOCKED LOOPS

15.7 CALIBRATION

15.8 FILTERS

15.9 OTHER STUFF

15.10 MORE ADVANCED FEEDBACK TECHNIQUES

15.11 HINTS

15.12 LINEARIZING

15.14 MISCELLANEOUS TRICKS

15.15 BULLETPROOFING

CHAPTER 16 Electronic Construction Techniques

16.1 INTRODUCTION

16.2 CIRCUIT STRAYS

16.3 STRAY COUPLING

16.4 GROUND PLANE CONSTRUCTION

16.5 TECHNICAL NOISE AND INTERFERENCE

16.6 PRODUCT CONSTRUCTION

16.7 GETTING READY

16.8 PROTOTYPING

16.9 SURFACE MOUNT PROTOTYPES

16.10 PROTOTYPING FILTERS

16.11 TUNING, OR, YOU CAN’T OPTIMIZE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE

CHAPTER 17 Digital Postprocessing

17.1 INTRODUCTION

17.2 ELEMENTARY POSTPROCESSING

17.3 DEAD TIME CORRECTION

17.4 FOURIER DOMAIN TECHNIQUES

17.5 POWER SPECTRUM ESTIMATION

17.6 DIGITAL FILTERING

17.7 DECONVOLUTION

17.8 RESAMPLING

17.9 FIXING SPACE-VARIANT INSTRUMENT FUNCTIONS

17.10 FINITE PRECISION EFFECTS

17.11 PULLING DATA OUT OF NOISE

17.12 PHASE RECOVERY TECHNIQUES

CHAPTER 18 Front Ends

18.1 INTRODUCTION

18.2 PHOTODIODE FRONT ENDS

18.3 KEY IDEA: REDUCE THE SWING ACROSS Cd

18.4 TRANSIMPEDANCE AMPLIFIERS

18.5 HOW TO GO FASTER

18.6 ADVANCED PHOTODIODE FRONT ENDS

18.7 OTHER TYPES OF FRONT END

18.8 HINTS

CHAPTER 19 Bringing Up the System

19.1 INTRODUCTION

19.2 AVOIDING CATASTROPHE

19.3 DEBUGGING AND TROUBLESHOOTING

19.4 GETTING READY

19.5 INDISPENSABLE EQUIPMENT

19.6 ANALOG ELECTRONIC TROUBLESHOOTING

19.7 OSCILLATIONS

19.8 OTHER COMMON PROBLEMS

19.9 DEBUGGING AND TROUBLESHOOTING OPTICAL SUBSYSTEMS

19.10 LOCALIZING THE PROBLEM

APPENDIX: GOOD BOOKS

Notation

Appendix: Good Books

Index

WILEY SERIES IN PURE AND APPLIED OPTICS

Founded by Stanley S. Ballard, University of Florida EDITOR: Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Boston University

BARRETT AND MYERS • Foundations of Image Science

BEISER • Holographic Scanning

BERGER-SCHUNN • Practical Color Measurement

BOYD • Radiometry and The Detection of Optical Radiation

BUCK • Fundamentals of Optical Fibers, Second Edition

CATHEY • Optical Information Processing and Holography

CHUANG • Physics of Optoelectronic Devices

DELONE AND KRAINOV • Fundamentals of Nonlinear Optics of Atomic Gases

DERENIAK AND BOREMAN •Infrared Detectors and Systems

DERENIAK AND CROWE • Optical Radiation Detectors

DE VANY • Master Optical Techniques

ERSOY • Diffraction, Fourier Optics and Imaging

GASKILL • Linear Systems, Fourier Transform, and Optics

GOODMAN • Statistical Optics

HOBBS • Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work, Second Edition

HUDSON • Infrared System Engineering

IIZUKA • Elements of Photonics, Volume I: In Free Space and Special Media

IIZUKA •Elements of Photonics, Volume II: For Fiber and Integrated Optics

JUDD AND WYSZECKI • Color in Business, Science, and Industry, Third Edition

KAFRI AND GLATT • The Physics of Moire Metrology

KAROW • Fabrication Methods for Precision Optics

KLEIN AND FURTAK • Optics, Second Edition

MALACARA • Optical Shop Testing, Third Edition

MILONNI AND EBERLY • Lasers

NASSAU • The Physics and Chemistry of Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color, Second Edition

NIETO - VESPERINAS • Scattering and Diffraction in Physical Optics

OSCHE • Optical Detection Theory for Laser Applications

O'SHEA • Elements of Modern Optical Design

OZAKTAS • The Fractional Fourier Transform

SALEH AND TEICH • Fundamentals of Photonics, Second Edition

SCHUBERT AND WILHELMI • Nonlinear Optics and Quantum Electronics

SHEN •The Principles of Nonlinear Optics

UDD • Fiber Optic Sensors: An Introduction for Engineers and Scientists

UDD • Fiber Optic Smart Structures

VANDERLUGT • Optical Signal Processing

VEST • Holographic Interferometry

VINCENT • Fundamentals of Infrared Detector Operation and Testing

WILLIAMS AND BECKLUND • Introduction to the Optical Transfer Function

WYSZECKI AND STILES • Color Science: Concepts and Methods, Quantitative Data and Formulae, Second Edition

XU AND STROUD • Acousto-Optic Devices

YAMAMOTO • Coherence, Amplification, and Quantum Effects in Semiconductor Lasers

YARIV AND YEH • Optical Waves in Crystals

YEH • Optical Waves in Layered Media

YEH • Introduction to Photorefractive Nonlinear Optics

YEH AND GU • Optics of Liquid Crystal Displays

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Hobbs, Philip C. D.Building electro-optical systems : making it all work / Philip C.D. Hobbs.-2nd ed. p. cm.-(Wiley series in pure and applied optics)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-470-40229-0 (cloth)1. Electrooptical devices–Design and construction. I. Title.TA1750.H63 2008621.381'045-dc22

2008047053

In memory of my father,Gerald H. D. HobbsJohn 6:40

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.

—Richard P. Feynman, Nobel lecture 1996

PREFACE

You are fools, to say you learn from your mistakes. I learn from the mistakes of other men.

—Otto von Bismarck

This is a book of lore. Lore is an old word for wisdom and knowledge. While it often refers to magic and epic poetry, what I mean by it is altogether more homely: a mixture of rules of thumb, experience, bits of theory, and an indefinable feeling for the right way to do things, a sort of technical taste. It is what makes the difference between analyzing a design once completed and coming up with a good design to fit a particular purpose. Course work and textbooks have lots of analysis but most contain no lore whatsoever.

One of the odd things about lore is that it lives in the fingers more than in the brain, like piano playing. In writing this book, I have often run up against the difference between how I do something and how I think I do it, or how I remember having done it. Since it’s the actual lore of doing that is useful, I have where possible written or revised each section when I was actually doing that task or consulting with someone who was. I hope that this gives those sections a sense of immediacy and authenticity.

Apologia

Lore is acquired slowly through experience and apprenticeship. Beginners pester experts, who help fairly willingly, mostly because they’re kept humble by stepping in potholes themselves. This mutual aid system works but is slow and unsystematic. As a beginner, I once spent nearly six months trying to get a fancy laser interferometer to work properly, a task that would now take about a week. The reason was a breakdown in the apprenticeship system—everyone consulted said “Oh, that comes with practice”—perfectly true, and by no means unsympathetic, but not too helpful. Conversations with many others in the field indicate that this sort of thing is the rule and not the exception. Time, enthusiasm, and confidence are far too precious to go wasting them like that.

This book is an attempt to provide a systematic and accessible presentation of the practical lore of electro-optical instrument design and construction—to be the book I needed as a graduate student. It is intended for graduate students at all levels, as well as practicing scientists and engineers: anyone who has electro-optical systems to build and could use some advice. Its applicability ranges from experimental apparatus to optical disc players.

The range of topics covered here is enormously broad, and I wish I were master of it all. Most of it was invented by others whose names I don’t know; it’s the lore of a whole field, as filtered through one designer’s head. It’s mostly been learned by watching and doing, or worked out with colleagues at a white board, rather than reading journal articles, so there aren’t many references. For further reading, there is a list of 100 or so good books in the Appendix that should fill in the gaps.

I hope that a book like this can erect bridges between subdisciplines, prevent common mistakes, and help all those working on an instrument project to see it as a whole. So much good stuff gets lost in the cracks between physics, electrical engineering, optical engineering, and computer science, that a salvage attempt seemed justified. I apologize to those whose work has been acknowledged inadequately or whose priority has been overlooked, and hope that they can remember once needing a book like this.

Mission

Designing and constructing electro-optical instruments is without a doubt one of the most interdisciplinary activities in engineering. It makes an absorbing and rewarding career, with little danger of growing stale. On the other hand, the same interdisciplinary quality means that instrument building is a bit scary and keeps us on our toes. The very broad range of technologies involved means that at least one vital subsystem lies outside the designer’s expertise, presenting a very real danger of major schedule slippage or outright failure, which may not become apparent until very late in the project.

We in electro-optics rely on whatever subset of these technologies we are familiar with, together with a combination of outside advice, collaboration, and purchased parts. Often, there are many ways of reaching the goal of a robust, working system; then the problem is where to start among a range of unfamiliar alternatives. It’s like the classic computer game ADVENT: ‘You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.’ Some judicious advice (and perhaps a map left by a previous adventurer) is welcome at such times, and that’s what this book is about, the lore of designing and building electro-optical instruments that work.

To have confidence in an instrument design, we really need to be able to calculate its performance ahead of time, without constructing an elaborate simulation. It is a nontrivial matter, given the current fragmented state of the literature, to calculate what the resolution and SNR of a measurement system will be before it is built. It’s not that there isn’t lots of information on how to calculate the performance of each lens, circuit, or computer program, but rather the complexity of the task and the very different ways in which the results are expressed in the different fields encountered. For example, what is the effect of fourth-order spherical aberration in the objective lens on the optimal band-setting filter in the analog signal processor, and then on the signal-to-noise ratio of the ultimate digital data set? Somebody on the project had better know that, and my aim is to make you that somebody.

The book is intended in the first instance for use by oppressed graduate students in physics and electrical engineering, who have to get their apparatus working long enough to take some data before they can graduate. When they do, they’ll find that real-world design work has much the same harassed and overextended flavor, so in the second instance, it’s intended for working electro-optical designers. It can be used as a text in a combined lecture–laboratory course aimed at graduate students or fourth-year undergraduates, and as a self-teaching guide and professional reference by working designers.

The warm reception that the first edition received suggests that despite its faults it has filled a real need. In this edition, everything has been revised, some previously over-terse sections have been expanded, and more than 100 pages’ worth of new material has been added. Component lists and electronic designs have been updated where needed. Only a very few things have been dropped, owing to space constraints or component obsolescence.

Organization

Textbooks usually aim at a linear presentation of concepts, in which the stuff on page n does not depend on your knowing pages n + 1. . . N. This is very valuable pedagogically, since the reader is initially unfamiliar with the material and usually will go through the book thoroughly, once, under the guidance of a teacher who is presenting information rapidly. Reference books are written for people who already have a grasp of the topic but need to find more detail or remind themselves of things dimly remembered. Thus they tend to treat topics in clumps, emphasizing completeness, and to be weak on overall explanations and on connections between topics.

Those two styles work pretty well in some subject areas, but design lore is not one of them. Its concepts aren’t branched like a tree, or packed like eggs in a crate, but rather are interlinked like a fishnet or a sponge; thus a purely linear or clumped presentation of lore is all but impossible without doing violence to it. Nonetheless, to be of any use, a lore book must be highly accessible, both easy to work through sequentially and attractive to leaf through many times.

Computer scientists use the concept of locality of reference—it’s a good thing if an algorithm works mainly with data near each other in storage, since it saves cache misses and page faults, but all the data have to be there, regardless. That’s the way I have tried to organize this book: most of the lore on a particular topic is kept close together in the book for conceptual unity and easy reference, but the topics are presented in a sufficiently linear order that later chapters build mainly on earlier ones, and important connections are noted in both forward and backward directions.ߤ A certain amount of messiness results, which (it is to be hoped) has been kept close to a minimum. This approach gives rise to one minor oddity, which is that the same instruments are considered from different angles in different chapters, so some flipping of pages is required to get the whole picture.

ߤ Because electro-optical lore is so interconnected, useful connections that are tangential to the discussion are relegated to footnotes. An occasional polemic is found there too.

The book is organized into three sections: Optics; Electronics and Signal Processing; and Special Topics In Depth (Front Ends and Bringing Up the System). There is also Supplementary Material, available from the websites ftp://ftp.wiley.com/public/sci_tech_med/electrooptical and http://electrooptical.net, which comprises Chapter 20 on Thermal Control and chapter problems for the whole book.

The material is presented in varying levels of detail. The differences in the detail levels reflect the amount of published lore and the measured density of deep potholes that people fall into. For example, there are lots of potholes in optomechanical design, but weighty books of relevant advice fill shelf after shelf. Anyway, mechanical problems aren’t usually what cause instrument projects to fail—unexamined assumptions, inexperience, and plain discouragement are. To get the job done, we talk instead about how to avoid common mistakes while coming up with something simple that works reliably.

The one big exception to this general scheme is Chapter 1. It pulls in strands from everywhere, to present the process and the rhythm of conceptual design, and so contains things that many readers (especially beginners) may find unfamiliar. Don’t worry too much about the technical aspects, because there’s more on all those things later in the book, as well as pointers to other sources.

A complete instrument design course based on this book would probably have to wait for a first- or second-year graduate class. Undergraduate students with a good grasp of electromagnetism, physical optics, and Fourier transforms might benefit from a fourth-year course on optical instruments based selectively on the first ten chapters. To get the most out of such a course, the audience should be people with instruments of their own to build, either in a lab course, as a senior project, or as part of their graduate work. Because of the complicated, interdisciplinary nature of instrument building, the laboratory part of the course might best be done by teams working on an instrument project rather than individually, provided that each designer knows enough about everybody else’s part to be able to explain it.

Chapter Problems

Chapter problems for the book are available on the websites listed above. Making complicated tasks intuitive is the true realm of lore—knowing the mathematical expression for the fringe pattern of a defocused beam is less useful than knowing which way to turn which knob to fix it. The most powerful method for gaining intuition is to use a combination of practical work and simple theoretical models that can be applied easily and stay close to the real physics. Accordingly, the emphasis in the problems is on extracting useful principles from theory and discussion.

Most of the problems have been taken from real design and scientific work, and so tend to be open-ended. Most students will have had a lot of theoretical training, but nowadays most will not have the skills of a Lightning Empiricist, a gimlet-eyed designer who’s fast at mental rule-of-thumb calculations and who sanity checks everything by reflex. Perhaps this book can help fix that.

Errata

A certain number of errors and misconceptions—hopefully minor—are bound to creep into a book of this type, size, and scope, unfortunately. I welcome your comments and corrections, large and small: errata and omissions will be made available at ftp://ftp.wiley.com/public/sci_tech_med/electro-optical/errata2.txt and http://electrooptical.net/www/beos2e/errata2.txt and will be incorporated in future printings. Send e-mail to [email protected].

P. C. D. HobbsBriarcliff Manor, New YorkMichaelmas (September 29), 2008

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To acquire lore, one needs a big sandbox and long uninterrupted stretches of time to spend there, absorbed in the play. I am forever grateful to my parents for providing that sort of environment in my growing up, and for believing in me even when only the mess was visible.

I learned most of this material through participating in the stimulating and supportive technical cultures of the places where I've been fortunate enough to study and to work: the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory at Stanford University, Stanford, California; the Department of Physics and the Department of Geophysics & Astronomy at the University of British Columbia and Microtel Pacific Research (both in Vancouver BC) and the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights, New York. I owe a special debt to IBM and to my managers there, Arthur Ciccolo, Frank Libsch, and John Mackay, for supporting this project and for generously allowing me time and resources to work on it.

I also wish to thank some of the many other gifted people who I have been privileged to have as close colleagues, teachers, and friends, particularly J. Samuel Batchelder (who first suggested I write this book), Donald M. DeCain, Kurt L. Haller, Gordon S. Kino, the late Roger H. Koch, Brian A. Murray, Martin P. O'Boyle, Marc A. Taubenblatt, Theodore G. van Kessel, and Robert H. Wolfe. Without them I'd still be stuck in one of those potholes way back along the road.

Most of all, I wish to thank my wife, Maureen, and our offspring, Bronwen, Magdalen, and Simon, for their patience and encouragement while I wrote and wrote.

P. C. D. H.