The Latest News and Action From LightMachinery
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We launched our Optics Wiki today. Our first entry is a Michelson Interferometer Whitepaper.
The steady growth of business at LightMachinery has created a steady squeeze on our available space. Over the next few months we will be adding more lab space within the Institute for Microstructural Science at the National Research Council of Canada. The labs in the M-23A building are facing East, which is ideal for maintaining a bright work environment without too much heat loading from afternoon sunshine. Constant temperature is essential for precision optical manufacturing since glass and equipment properties change quickly with temperture. The labs have been freshly painted and new floors have been installed. Once a little more power and water has been added we will be relocating some of our precision polishing equipment to the new space. The move will be in small steps over the next 6 months and will not affect customer commitments. The added capacity will enable our team to focus on the production of new standard ultra-high accuracy beam splitters and etalons.
You might be interested in some of the changes to our etalon page at http://www.lightmachinery.com/fabry-perot-etalons.html.
This week we are pleased to add excimer lasers from ATL to the products that we offer our North American customers. ATL manufactures a very well engineered small excimer laser that is a perfect compliment to the large excimers that we currently distribute for GSI Lumonics. The ATL lasers have a small gas volume and are very economical to operate. These lasers are simple to integrate to micro-machining workstations from Optec, for hole drilling and micromachining of delicate components. In addtion, the short pulse length of a few nanoseconds is important to customers in spectroscopy and other scientific applications. Check out the ATL lasers on our excimer page.
Today we added a list of optics and laser books that we think everyone should have on their shelf. There is some good information that can be found on the internet but it can be very frustrating trying to find in-depth information on very technical subjects. The recommending reading section in our Library provides direct links to Amazon so that you can order the books and have them delivered to your door. We have listed quite a few of our favorites; Elements of Modern Optical Design by Don O'Shea (recently retired from Georgia Tech) , Macleod's Thin Film Optical Filters for those of you that want to understand thin film design, as well as Fundamentals of Photonics by Saleh and Born and Wolf's Principles of Optics. Check it out and enjoy!
For those of us that lived through the great rise and fall of telecom demand, things have seemed pretty quiet for the last few years. Recently business from that sector seems to be picking up a bit and we are pleased to have added a some new Telecom customers. This sector has always provided some unique and interesting challenges, pushing the limits of conventional optical manufacuring and coating technology. Micro-optics, tiny prisms, beam splitters, attenuators, little air spaced etalons, optically contacted parts, micro michelson interferometers, tricky coatings and everything diced up into 1.5mm x 2.5mm components are typical of the tough requirements of the telecom industry. Fortunately all the techniques used to make large lambda/50 apply nicely to making tiny devices and the longer telecom wavelengths at 1550nm in the near IR make things a little easier as well. If only we didn't have to use tweezers...
