On a recent expedition to collect mail, I hauled back a box that seemed to contain a brick, but instead yielded a catalog: 3 kg, 1148 glossy pages, and descriptions of about 6000 items. It’s also available as a zero-mass 336.9 MB download (or piecemeal here). Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with the company (Thorlabs), and I plan to buy nothing from the catalog, but I am in awe of its contents.
It displays the state-of-the-art in lab equipment for photonics and photonics-based research. Implicitly, it shows what it means for a technology to become fully real. Although a steady stream of hype pours through the science press, and it seems that every new molecule or phenomenon promises a new technology, most of these fade away and vanish from human attention. The fading, of course, makes no news, and commercialization often makes little more. This brick-in-the-mail surveys a host of technologies that have succeeded, and success for a technology can almost be defined as “sold in a catalog”.
This photonics catalog offers 70 pages of platforms and tables (vibration isolated), 6 pages of femtosecond laser gear (1 femtocentury = 3 microseconds), handy gadgets that violate time-reversal symmetry by transmitting light in only one direction (unlike so-called “one-way mirrors”), periodically poled, optical-quality lithium niobate crystals (infrared beam in, green beam out), just-on-the-market Adaptive Scanning Optical Microscopes (warning: data acquisition speed “is expected to double every 3–6 months”), along with lenses, Gloves (Lint-Free), and similarly dissimilar stuff. I received this treat because I spoke at a SPIE photonics event, an encounter that sent my name circulating through the world of photonics mailing lists.
Photonics makes electronics look simple. Rosa asked, Why is this?, then demanded that I blog about it. I see two fundamental reasons —
- Geometry matters enormously: Consider wires and sockets vs. lenses and optical paths. Photonics products include optical elements sculpted, positioned, and moved with nanoscale precision.
- Frequency matters enormously: Silicon devices spans a frequency range of a billion or more; in photonics, a 1% difference in frequency can require a new material system or change the applicability of a device.
These differences stem directly from the wave nature of light propagation and the correspondence between photon energies and the energies of electronic transitions in molecules and materials. Make devices that embody this complexity and diversity, integrate them with electromechanical systems, exploit the strange interactions of light and matter, and watch the breadth of the field grow, year after year. Photonic technologies are ubiquitous, and as I noticed back in grad school, they keep surprising me.
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