Herbert Gross, born in 1955, joined Carl Zeiss in 1982 after finishing his physics degree as specialist for optical design. Since 1995 he has been working as head of the department of optical design, while also teaching as a lecturer in Aalen and Lausanne. The new handbook is an intuitive, didactically elegant approach to the subject of optical systems and is not competed by any other work on the market. The selected board of authors, all reputed industrial experts, guarantee the timeliness of the well coordinated, coherent chapters. The sixth and concluding volume of this reference work focuses on advanced technologies in optics. Laser beams and resonators, thin layers and short pulses, diffractive optics and holography, fibre optics and adaptive optics are investigated in detail. With this last and the five prior volumes, the reader is provided with a complete and thoroughly developed background in optical systems, from the very basics to the newest and most recent applications.