OPTICS IS OPTICS IS BIG The Uof A
OPTICS IS…
OPTICS IS… BIG The Uof. A Steward Observatory Mirror Lab casts mirrors up to 8. 5 meters in diameter
OPTICS IS… SMALL An array of 1600 of these tiny lenses easily fits on a quarter. They are used in a Shack-Hartmann optical test system
OPTICS IS… HOT National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore will deposit 1. 8 MJ in 2 nanosec onto a 2 mm diameter tritium target, heating it to 100, 000 K
OPTICS IS… COOL Laser cooling and trapping at OSC can capture and slow down individual atoms until their effective temperature is 0. 0000001 K.
OPTICS IS… FAST A 9 micron fiber can carry data at a rate of 10 Gbit/sec. Using dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM, 16 wavelengths), 2, 000 simultaneous phone converstations can be transmitted through a single fiber
OPTICS IS… SLOW Using a new process, it now takes only 27 days to grow KDP crystals to this size for frequency multiplication (It used to take 1 year!)
OPTICS IS… NEAR Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) at OSC can get close enough to resolve individual atoms (like these three buckyballs).
OPTICS IS… FAR Uof. A NICMOS on Hubble Space Telescope found this galaxy 12 billion light years distant. OSC contributions to HST include discovery of the original out-of-focus problems
OPTICS IS… NEW LED’s are now available in three primary colors (great for displays) and in white for illumination. A violet laser diode (400 nm) is a recent introduction; expect smaller spot sizes and denser data storage.
OPTICS IS… OLD In 1609, Galileo built a telescope based on an earlier design and used it to discover four of Jupiter’s moons
OPTICS IS… NIGHT A Gen III image intensifier can produce a useful image under starlight. You can see a 6’ tall man at a distance of 580 yards.
OPTICS IS… DAY The sulfur lamp, the size of a golf ball, produces nearly 100 times as much light as a conventional HID lamp, nearly 1000 times as much as a 40 watt tungsten lamp.
OPTICS IS… VISIBLE Revo polarized sunglasses were invented by a graduate of the Optical Sciences Center
OPTICS IS… INVISIBLE Heat associated with a neck and back pain is easily viewed with an infrared thermograph
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