Partially Coherent

Wood is a precious material. It has been used for thousands of years as fuel, in construction, for tools and weapons, as well as for furniture and paper. It is also important for biochemistry in the production of purified cellulose and its derivatives, such as cellophane and cellulose acetate. Wood has unarguably been the most important raw material that allowed civilizations to flourish and it will probably remain that way. But quite recently the usefulness of wood has expanded to a completely new area: photonics and optics. When you think about it, it sounds improbable, or even down right stupid to use wood as a material in optical physics, but that's really what has been going on! Let me be clear, this is not the type of wood you would traditionally use, but chemically treated so that it transmits light. The process is simple in principle, you just soak some wood in a chemical that dissolves lignin. Then you take the delignified wood and add epoxy to it, and voila! You