OPTICS IS…

OPTICS IS…BIG

The UofA 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 1.8MJ in 2 nanosec onto a 2 mm diameter tritium target,

heating it to 100,000,000K

OPTICS IS…COOL

Laser cooling and trapping at OSC can

capture and slow down individual atoms until

their effective temperature is 0.0000001K.

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), 2,000,000

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

UofA 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 (400nm) 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