Historically, fluorescent and quartz halogen lighting sources have been used most commonly. In recent years, LED technology has improved in stability, intensity, and cost-effectiveness; however, it is still not as cost-effective for large area lighting, particularly compared with fluorescent sources. However, if application flexibility, output stability, and longevity are important parameters, then LED lighting might be more appropriate. Depending on the exact lighting requirements, oftentimes you can use more than one source type for a specific implementation, and most vision experts agree that one source type cannot adequately solve all lighting issues.

Consider not only a source’s brightness but also its spectral content (Figure 3). Microscopy applications, for example, often use a full-spectrum quartz halogen, xenon, or mercury source, particularly when imaging in color; however, a monochrome LED source is also useful for a black and white CCD camera, and also now for color applications, with the advent of “all color—RGB” and white LED light heads.

In those applications requiring high light intensity, such as high-speed inspections, it may be useful to match the source’s spectral output with the spectral sensitivity of your particular vision camera (Figure 4). For example, CMOS sensor-based cameras are more IR sensitive than their charge-coupled device (CCD) counterparts, imparting a significant sensitivity advantage in light-starved inspection settings when using IR LED or IR-rich Tungsten sources.

Photons carry no charge, so a magnetic field does not deflect them.

On a lattice, a hopping charge is attach a phase to each hop; around a plaquette the phases add up to the enclosed flux.

Engineer those phases for light, and it circulates around loops, follows cyclotron-like orbits and travels one way along edges: a synthetic magnetic field for photons.

I made a short animated explainer of this idea, from the Aharonov–Bohm effect to photonic quantum-Hall edge states. Every animation is computed from the underlying model.

More on the channel

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dqJiUbL5hHg

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I am a student who has started learning photonics and I tried SolidSquad's crack but it stops working for me after I restart. And now I am stuck.