FIBER OPTICS (FO)

The branch of optical technology concerned with the transmission of light through fibers made of transparent materials such as glasses and plastics. ( 188 ) [ 2196 ] Note 1: Telecommunications applications of fiber optics use flexible low- loss fibers, using a single fiber per optical path . Present-day plastic fibers have losses that are too high for telecommunications applications. Note 2: Various industrial and medical applications of fiber optics, such as endoscopes, use flexible fiber bundles in which individual fibers are spatially aligned, permitting optical relay of an image. Note 3: Some specialized industrial applications use rigid (fused) aligned fiber bundles for image transfer ; such as in the fiber optics faceplates used on some cathode ray rubes (CRTs) to "flatten" the image.