ThorLabs Mobile Photonic Labs Shines Light on Photonics

BY CIAN HAMMEL-KELLEHER

Photo Credit: ThorLabs

Students lined up outside the truck-trailer in May Pavilion to get a look at an interesting lab that is shining a light on photonics.

The Thorlabs Mobile Photonics Lab Experience drew dozens of students on October 3 in the latest coast-to-coast educational stop.

Photonics is the science and technology behind the generation, detection and manipulation of light.

The Mobile Lab left its headquarters in Newton, New Jersey in September and has stopped in New York and will continue through the New England area before heading south down the East Coast, crossing through the southern part of the country, and ending up in California in January.

“You run into our technologies at least five times a day and you don’t even know it,” an employee of Thorlabs Measurement Systems said.

In the medical field, professionals can use imaging to non-invasively see inside a human body because of photonics.

In the automobile industry, photonics is being used for automatic stop feature on cars.

One of the most frequent encounters with photonics, more specifically fiber-optics, is through the internet, as shown by one of the Mobile Lab’s experiments.

In one experiment shown in the lab, a small hole was put in the side of a water bottle to let a steady flow of water pour out through the hole. A light was then shown through the hole and instead of refracting when it hit the water, the light followed the flow of water pouring from the bottle, demonstrating how glass and plastic fiber-optic cables carry and transport light signals that hold data.

The Thorlabs Mobile Photonics Lab Experience will continue to wave on the bright future of photonics.