What is Photonics?

     It was difficult to imagine 10 years ago that the Internet and personal computers would become main technologies in economical and technical development of the world civilization. Possibilities of modern television and telecommunication from the point of view of the passive contact to the information even taking into consideration the potential and the perspectives of the development cannot be compared with the possibilities of the the Internet with its active exchange and the use of the information. The key problem on the way of holding of these technologies by human being is the spreading of the possibilities providing by the Internet for each home and office.(Bill Gates, the International Economic Meeting, Davos 2000)..      It is this problem which a new branch of science the so-called photonics is deboted to.      It is photonics that can create the means of delivering of the whole information to the user at any corner of the world. Photonics embraces a wide spectrum of optical, electrooptical and optoelectronical devices the variety of their usage. The main fields of photonics research comprise fibre and integral optics and non-linear optics including physics and technologies of semiconductor compounds, semiconductor lasers, optoelectronical devices and high-speed electronical devices. Photonics like electronics may be characterized as a field of physics and technologies connected with emission, detection, conduct, the consequence of the existence and destruction of photons. It means that photonics controls and transforms optical signals and it has a wide range of its usage from transmission of the informations over optical fibers to the creation of new sensors which modulate light signals in accordance with the minute changes of the environment. In the nearest future photonics will integrate glass waveguides into silicon microschemes for direct transmission of light signals from laser transmitters over optical waveguide to the chip where these signals are processed optically much faster than electrically before they will be transmitted again over optical network.      New interdisciplinary branches appiear in the world due to the huge scientific and technical demand of new results within photonics. For example microwave photonics can be defined as interaction between an optical signal and high-frequency electrical signal (>1 GHz). This branch includes the basis of optico-microwave interaction, work of photonics devices at SHF, photonics control of SHF devices, HF transmission lines and the use of photonics for the fulfilment of different functions in the microschemes. Photonics is widely used in the remote antenns, long delay lines and etc.