detector

Other Definitions
detector (dict)

In telecommunications, the term detector has the following meanings:

A device that is responsive to the presence or absence of a stimulus.
In an AM radio receiver, a circuit or device that recovers the signal of interest from the modulated wave.
In FM reception, a circuit called a discriminator is used to convert frequency variations to amplitude variations.
In an optical communications receiver, a device that converts the received optical signal to another form.

Note: Currently, this conversion is from optical to electrical power; however, optical-to-optical techniques are under development.

In astronomy, the detecting devices generally used is charge-coupled devices (CCD), although, before the 1990s, photographic plates were the most common. In experimental particle physics, a particle detector is a device used to track and identify elementary particles.

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