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Patent highlights

11 Feb 2004

The pick of this week’s patent applications including an efficient white light source that uses a discharge lamp and an LED.

•  Title: Lamp system with green-blue gas-discharge lamp and yellow-red LED
Applicant: Philips Intellectual Property & Standards GmbH, Germany
International application number: WO 2004/011846
Consumer electronics giant Philips is trying to patent a way to make an efficient source of white light. The idea involves combining the output from a blue and green emitting fluorescent lamp with that from a red-yellow emitting AlGaInP LED or a red emitting AlGaAs LED. “Through additive mixing of the light from these high-efficiency light sources, the invention provides a highly efficient light source with good color rendering which contains all three primary colors,” say the inventors.

•  Title: Method for isotope separation of thallium
Applicant: Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Korea
International application number: WO 2004/011129
Patent application WO 2004/011129 describes a way to produce isotopes of the Group 3 element thallium. First, a laser operating at 378 nm pumps atoms of thallium from their ground state into an excited state. After decaying to a metastable level, 292 nm light is used to excite the thallium atoms into a resonant state. The atoms are ionized by bombarding them with laser light in the 700 to 1400 nm region.

•  Title: Infrared shielding glass
Applicant: Asahi Glass Company, Ltd, Japan
International application number: WO 2004/011381
If you are fed up with the Sun beating down on you through your office window then the infrared-blocking glass in patent application WO 2004/011381 should be of interest. According to its inventors, the glass transmits 35% of light at 1 micron, 20% at 2 microns and lets through a high percentage of visible light. The secret behind the glass is said to be a thin coating containing fine particles of a conductive oxide.

•  Title: Fourier transform spectrometry with a multi-aperture interferometer
Applicant: Lockheed Martin Corporation, US
International application number: 2004/011963
Lockheed Martin has applied to patent a spectrometer that can extract spectral information from a wavefront. The device contains two detectors, one of which is placed in an arm with an adjustable path length. The detectors each collect a portion of the wavefront and combining optics interfere these signals at an image plane. The authors say that a Fourier transform module can then be configured to derive spectral information from the interference patterns.

Author
Jacqueline Hewett is news reporter on Optics.org and Opto & Laser Europe magazine.

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