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OPTICS IS…. LIGHT WORK. 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.
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OPTICS IS… LIGHT WORK
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