Photonics-it's light, but not as we know it. Over the past couple of decades, new techniques have moulded the flow of light in useful and unusual ways. It could be argued that the field of 'photonics' was launched with the discovery of the laser in the 1960; with the advent of this pure, stable and bright light source, new opportunities arose for making use of light, of which perhaps the most notable is the adoption of light as a carrier of information. The now widespread implementation of fibre-optic telecommunication networks is a vivid demonstration of just how fast the technology has developed.
