The latest edition of the handbook is available free of charge to any UK user of diffraction gratings, from Newport Rochester's UK representative Photonics and Analytical Marketing
The latest edition of the Richardson Grating Laboratory (now Newport Rochester) Diffraction Grating Handbook is available free of charge to any UK user of diffraction gratings, from its UK representative Photonics and Analytical Marketing.
Since its establishment in the late 1940s as the Bausch and Lomb Grating Laboratory, the laboratory has become the world's largest manufacturer of all types of diffraction gratings.
The handbook is written for anyone with an interest in the theory of, design of, manufacture, and use of diffraction gratings.
To quote GR Harrison: "It is difficult to point to another single device that has brought more important experimental information to every field of science than the diffraction grating.
"The physicist, the astronomer, the chemist, the biologist, the metallurgist, all use it as a routine tool of unsurpassed accuracy and precision, as a detector of atomic species to determine the characteristics of heavenly bodies and the presence of atmospheres in the planets, to study the structures of molecules and atoms, and to obtain a thousand and one items of information without which modern science would be greatly handicapped".
The handbook was first produced in 1970 written by Edwin Loewen, and has undergone regular revisions and updates as new types of gratings, new manufacturing methods and new applications in areas such as lasers and telecoms have been developed.
The latest edition is the work of the chief scientist and general manager of the laboratory, Christopher Palmer.
