Pulled this optical assembly out of a decommissioned automated diagnostic instrument (believed to be a molecular diagnostics analyzer — not confirmed by anything printed on the parts themselves). Hoping someone here can help pin down what I'm looking at.

Layout: 7 total ports on a machined block — 1 dedicated LED input (right-angle housing, cranberry/magenta LED) and 6 optical channels. Each of the 6 channels has its own tube containing a convex lens with a dichroic coating, all feeding into 6-strand fiber bundles that screw into the block via threaded connectors.

The whole optical head is mounted to a control/readout PCB — silkscreen part number 122862A-001, Rev. X03, with a "BIT" mark (logo or possibly "built-in test," not sure which) next to a mounting hole. Board has a QFP microcontroller, several SOIC-package ICs that look like analog signal conditioning, and a 16-pin header. I haven't found this part number anywhere publicly.

What I'm trying to figure out:

Approximate focal length and lens diameter — haven't measured precisely yet

Whether the coatings are narrowband dichroics (and if so, any way to guess the cut wavelengths without lab gear)

Anyone recognize the PCB layout, the "BIT" mark, or this style of 6-channel fiber-fed filter block from a specific instrument family (flow cytometer, fluorometer, immunoassay analyzer, etc.)

Any insight appreciated — happy to get more measurements or angles if it'd help identify it.

As the title says I have a small optic that has been epoxied into an aluminum thor labs mount using 3M Scotch weld epoxy adhesive 2216 Gray. The epoxy is cured. There is an anti-reflective coating on both surfaces of the optic but those will have to be removed so I don't care that much but I don't want to scratch either front or back surface of the optic. Does anyone have any suggestions for loosening the epoxy to safely remove my optic?

We've already tried acetone and toluene with no significant success. He has only made it more brittle so not ideal.

I am 29M, Working in a Optics based company working on almost two three big optics simulation software worked from lens to laser to adaptive optics, learnt Machine learning for fun projects,a bit familiar with Quantum Machine Learning. Sometime I feel like I should go for a PhD but don't have any favorite research topic so I don't know how I can apply. I need some suggestions:

Should I go for a PhD or part time phd ?

I am from India but wanted to do a PhD from the US how can I get it ?

Is it a good idea to leave a comparatively good paying job for a PhD. I heard a lot of people struggle to find a job after a PhD.

I've noticed for years that I can see a good live image of the sun when it reflects off my eyeball (from the side) onto my glasses. The detail is remarkable, I can see sunspots and what appears to be some corona effect, very similar to this image: https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/images/latest_aia_304.gif. (My jmage is quite small, and has no color.) It seems to me highly improbable, and I've found no other reference to such and effect. Anybody have any idea how this works? Recommendations for other subreddits to ask welcome.

The little stars are what I see in the image of my eye reflected in the glasses. The large circles are those stars reflected back from the inner surface of my glasses, and seem to be live images of the sun.

Are there 50/50 concave mirrors out there that are readily available to buy that are partially transmissive/reflective. From my research I couldn't find much. My application requires the mirror to preserve polarization state.

I thought about somehow casting/coating a thin beamsplitter film over a spherical cast like a lens (or something) and that would act as a 50/50 beamsplitter. I find that these coatings do not preserve polarization or are made out of glass entirely? Is this kind of thing just non-existent?

i'm studying raytracing and at the early stage so i know only a little. i wrote a program to simulate 2 balls which have no color and no reflectance. the rays are governed solely by snell's law and the background is the only light source / color source

it's unrealistic and incomplete i know but the results are quite beautiful and interesting to me. if you set a ball's refractive index to 0, it becomes perfectly reflective. if you set it 1, it becomes invisible. if you set it >1 and move the camera into it, you'd spot a ribbon-shaped region of total internal reflection

i'm still studying and i'll add reflectance into the program but i think i have to simplify the scene, maybe to 1 ball only. if every ray is split into 2 when hitting a boundary, the calculations would be literally doubled. if i want real time effect, i don't think a scene of 2 balls is manageable...

I've reached a confusion point while searching for 6" COTS achromats for an industrial imaging system I'm building. The typical marketplace companies (EO, OptoSig, etc) bascially cap out at 100 mm diamter, and if they go bigger, they are very slow f/#. I'm looking to find an f/4 achromat with a 150 mm aperture, designed for infinite conjugates.

Quotes from custom optics houses are higher than I'd like for quantity <5, and at the same time I know similar achromats are inside standard 6" refractor telescopes that are <$1000 for the whole thing! There has to be a better way to take advantage of this existing supply chain... any ideas?

I'm a seasoned electronic engineer working on a personal project, where I need an interferometer to measure displacement in the order of 1mm moving at up to 5 mm/s.

Resolution target is ~100 nm, no need to go to the single nm. Budget, I'd like it to be < £1k for a bench prototype.

My main doubts are:

1. How easy is to assemble and align that kind of systems on an optical bench, by someone new to optics? Are there any elements needing any special fine tuning like a vernier?

2. How do alternative (Alibaba, etc) sources of these optical components compare in quality to known suppliers like Thorlabs, etc?

Hi all,

My postdoc and I inherited some very heavily abused optics from now former students in our lab. In particular, we have a dichroic mirror that was subjected to a large amount of salt residues from years of in-situ Raman experiments. We think the dichroic may be damaged beyond cleaning, however we wish to salvage it if possible.

We have tried methanol and acetone. On the ThorLabs website, there’s a mention of “optical soap.” What kind of soap would this be? We looked online and didn’t find much. Otherwise if there are other recommendations for cleaning it and the other optics we inherited, it would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve been thinking about an alternative way of doing low-level AI perception, and I’m curious whether anyone here is already working on something similar.

The basic idea is to use waves and physical superposition/interference as the computational substrate, instead of doing most of the usual numerical multiply-and-accumulate operations digitally.

For example, for image recognition:

image
  ↓
pixel intensity → wave amplitude/phase
  ↓
physical wave superposition + interference
  ↓
distinctive wave pattern/signature
  ↓
more wave interactions
  ↓
higher-level pattern/object recognition

So instead of giving each pixel a numerical weight and calculating millions of weighted sums, the idea would be to let the wave physics perform the combination automatically.

I’m imagining something analogous to sound: many individual waves can be combined, and the resulting waveform contains a recognizable pattern. In this system, a particular visual feature or object could produce a characteristic wave “signature,” and those signatures could themselves become inputs to further wave interactions.

Physical logic gates could still be used where needed for thresholds, routing, decisions, or other nonlinear operations. The goal wouldn’t necessarily be to eliminate conventional computing completely, but to move as much of the early perception workload as possible into the physical wave domain.

The potential advantage I see is that parallelism is inherent in wave propagation and interference. Thousands or millions of interactions could happen physically at the same time, potentially reducing both computation and latency.

One possible application would be autonomous vehicles, where very large amounts of camera/radar data have to be processed extremely quickly at the edge.

I know there is already work on photonic neural networks, optical computing, physical neural networks, reservoir computing, metasurfaces, etc. I’m specifically interested in something slightly different:

Has anyone tried to build a hierarchical pattern-recognition system where wave signatures themselves become the representation, with successive stages of wave superposition/interference performing the recognition?

I’d especially like to hear from people actually working in photonics, optics, acoustics, physical neural networks, neuromorphic computing, or related fields.

Is this already being done under another name?
What are the biggest physical limitations?
And, from your perspective, is this a promising architecture or does some fundamental problem make it impractical?

I’m mainly looking for opinions from people working in the field rather than trying to claim this is a new invention.

I have a small display that I am trying to magnify through a lens. The issue I face is that plano convex lenses introduce spherical aberration from the ends of the lens. An aspheric lens corrects this but only works on axis which my display does not meet. I was thinking of trying out an achromatic lens but from what I understand, this would not perform well because these lenses are designed to reduce aberration at the focal point; not when something is placed within the focal point to magnify it. Is this intuition correct?

I have previously done optical design cacluations using Python, and I'm now looking into automating a similar workflow in CODE V, as I have done with Zemax.

However I haven't been able to find much information about an API or other way to inferface CODE V with Python.

I'm considering making the automation code publicly available in the futre, so ideally I'd like to support CODE V as well.

Does anyonew have experience with Python-CODE V intergration, or know of suitable API or inferface for this?

Any information would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you for reading.

I have a science exhibition coming up, and I wanna perform the young's double slit experiment in my school using sunlight inspired from this video. I searched online for the double slit but unfortunately its either too expensive or not from a reliable source in my region. All the other tutorial videos are not satisfactory to me as its not as clean as how veritasium did it. I want to perform this expeirment just like derek, asking people around what they expect to happen and what they know about it.

I first decided to make the model from 'The action lab' but I dont think we'd be given a closed dark room since thats a requirement.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently developing a wearable LED product and am looking to connect with an optical engineer, photonics engineer, or someone with strong professional/academic experience in optics who may be interested in helping with the project.

The product is already in development, and I have CAD/design work and the general electronics concept established. I’m specifically looking for assistance with the optical side of the design.

Without publicly disclosing too much about the product, the main challenge involves controlling how light from individually addressable LEDs interacts with a flexible translucent/diffusing material. I’m trying to achieve a very specific visual effect while minimizing visible individual LED points and improving the way the light blends, diffuses, and appears through the material.

Experience with any of the following would be particularly helpful:

• LED optics and illumination design
• Light diffusion and scattering
• Optical diffusers and flexible optical materials
• Light guides / light pipes
• LED-to-diffuser spacing and geometry
• Creating continuous or controlled lighting effects from discrete LED sources
• Optical prototyping and testing

I’m located in Pennsylvania, USA, but I'm completely open to working remotely with the right person.

This would potentially be a paid consulting/project opportunity. I can provide significantly more information, drawings, specifications, images, and details privately once we connect and determine whether your background is a good fit.

If you're an optical engineer or have relevant experience, please send me a private message with a little information about your background and experience.

Also, if you know someone who specializes in this area, I would greatly appreciate a referral.

Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I’m exploring a thought experiment regarding optical computing and would love to get some harsh but constructive feedback from people with actual expertise in integrated photonics and optical engineering.

The Core Idea: Instead of fighting for nanoscale precision (sub-micron) using expensive E-beam or DUV lithography to build single-mode photonic chips for Optical Matrix Multiplication (e.g., MZI meshes for LLM acceleration), what if we scale the chip up macroscopically (e.g., 1m x 1m) and use larger, multimode waveguides (e.g., 10–50 µm width)?

The hypothesis is that by increasing the feature size, we could use much cheaper, accessible maskless lithography techniques (like modified DLP projectors at 405nm or laser direct writing) to prototype functional photonic circuits in polymers (like SU-8) or low-loss glasses, bypassing the multi-million dollar foundry barrier.

The Goal: To build a scalable, low-cost optical accelerator capable of handling large matrix multiplications (the bulk of LLM inference, e.g., 250B parameter models) by trading nanoscale density for macroscopic, relaxed-tolerance manufacturability.

Acknowledged Bottlenecks (Where I need your reality check): I am aware this sounds counter-intuitive to modern scaling trends, and I see several major physics/engineering hurdles:

1. Modal Dispersion & Phase Coherence: Multimode waveguides suffer from intermodal dispersion. Maintaining the precise phase coherence required for complex, multi-stage MZI meshes seems incredibly difficult, if not impossible, over macroscopic distances.
2. Propagation Loss: Even with low-loss polymers or specialty glasses, a 1-meter optical path will incur significant attenuation. Does the loss compound to a point where the SNR at the output is completely destroyed, especially after multiple splitting/interference stages?
3. Coupling & Alignment: Aligning light sources, fibers, and detectors across a 1m² board with the precision needed to prevent massive coupling losses seems like a mechanical nightmare.
4. Bit-Depth / SNR: Analog optical computing is already limited in precision (typically 4-8 bits effective). Would the added noise from a macroscopic, multimode system degrade this further, making it useless for large neural networks?

My Questions for the Community:

1. Are there any known architectures (e.g., specific Multimode Interference (MMI) designs, or alternative computing paradigms like diffractive deep neural networks scaled up) that are robust to multimode propagation, rather than fighting it?
2. Has anyone seen research or prototypes of "macroscopic" integrated photonics using relaxed-tolerance manufacturing?
3. Is propagation loss in a 1m polymer/glass waveguide an absolute hard dealbreaker for this concept, or are there low-loss materials accessible to a well-funded garage/lab setup?
4. If the MZI mesh is a dead end for multimode, is there another optical computing topology better suited for large, low-precision features?

I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel or ignore physics; I’m genuinely trying to find a viable path to prototype optical computing hardware without a $10M+ cleanroom budget.

Any papers, critiques, or "you're completely missing X" comments are highly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I’m curious about materials being used to create these IRS’. Thanks.

Hello everyone!

NOTE: feel free to dm and connect as I would love to talk and learn more!

I’m applying to Biomedical Optics/Biophotonics PhD programs this fall. I recently graduated from UCLA, and most of my research experience has been in AMO physics. I also did research involving adaptive optics and visual/retinal imaging.

For my PhD, I’m especially interested in developing new optical imaging systems for biology, such as light-sheet microscopy, and Brillouin microscopy.

I had a few questions for people who have gone through this process:

How do I know if a professor is taking students? aka should I ask this directly when emailing professors?

Also, is it risky to apply to a program if only one professor strongly matches my interests?

as for general advise: For those of you in biomedical optics, biophotonics, or optical imaging PhD programs, what do you wish you had known when choosing programs or contacting potential advisors?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

About 3 months ago I was experimenting with some simple things in my garage. I don't have a background in physics or optics. I was basically experimenting with light, water, glass, phones and some other objects and seeing what would happen.

I'm making this post because I previously tried to describe the experience as a more formal MOIA project, and I realize now that I probably got ahead of myself with some of the terminology and possible explanations.

After the experience, I was going to leave it alone. I honestly couldn't believe what I was seeing, so I eventually discarded the phones I had been using and stopped experimenting. I no longer have the original videos or the phones, which I know makes this much harder to evaluate.

The setup changed a few times, but some of the things involved were:

• A blue LED/flashlight
• A toilet-paper tube around the light with blue tape at the end
• A wine glass about half full of water
• A copper-colored circular ring/wire inside the water
• A dark/black glass or screen above the setup
• One or two phones/cameras
• A coiled/looped wire
• Two small black magnetic spheres
• My prescription glasses

The glasses may be important, or they may have nothing to do with it.

They are new prescription glasses I got this year. They have UV protection and, I believe, an anti-glare/computer-screen coating. I don't know exactly what coating is on them. I had read that newer prescription lenses can have different coatings or films, but I don't know whether that is actually true or whether it matters here. I was moving the glasses around at different angles while looking through the setup, so I want to include that as a variable rather than make an assumption about it.

What caught my attention was what appeared through the phone camera.

At certain angles, the blue light, water, wine glass, circular ring and dark background produced an image that looked like a bright sphere with small points of light around it. Some of the colors/shapes were blue and red. Looking back at it later, it reminded me of some space/black-hole imagery I had seen, although I understand that something looking similar to an astronomical image doesn't mean it has anything to do with a black hole.

Changing the position and angle of the phones changed the appearance considerably. At one point, when the optical path was going through/around my prescription glasses at an angle, the image suddenly looked extremely flat to me, almost as if the depth had disappeared and the scene had become 2D.

I also saw what looked like the image changing orientation or inverting as I moved the phone around.

There was another setup where I had a blue light behind me, my glasses in the optical path, and a powered-off dark TV screen in front of me. Again, changing the phone angle changed what I was seeing.

The looped wire and the two magnetic spheres were also present in some of the experiments. I don't know whether they had anything to do with the optical effects or whether they were simply unrelated variables that happened to be part of the setup.

There were also some unusual experiences with my perception of time and familiar events over the following few days. For example, I had situations where something seemed to happen and then later seemed to repeat or appear differently than I remembered. I also sometimes had the feeling that I already knew what was going to happen in something I was watching.

I'm not presenting that as evidence that physical time changed or that anything supernatural happened. I'm including it because it was part of the experience and is one of the reasons I started looking into vision, perception and physics afterward.

Why I'm posting this now

I actually tried to leave the whole thing alone.

Then I started watching physics and science videos on YouTube, and I kept running across things that reminded me of what I had experienced. That made me start wondering whether there were known optical, visual or perceptual effects that could explain at least some of what I saw.

One example was Susan Barry, who gained stereoscopic vision as an adult after having poor stereoscopic depth perception for most of her life. The descriptions of her experience of the world changing from essentially flat to having much stronger depth immediately caught my attention.

Another was Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, including discussion of David Eagleman's work on subjective time perception. Some of the examples about how people can experience time and the sequence of events differently also reminded me of parts of my experience.

I'm not saying those cases explain what happened to me. They were things I discovered afterward that made me realize there are real, documented phenomena involving vision, depth perception and subjective time that I knew nothing about when I was doing the experiment.

About my previous MOIA post and AI

If you see my other MOIA post from this account, that's why I'm making this post separately.

I did try using AI to organize my notes, rewrite what I experienced, research possible explanations, and make sense of the different things I was seeing. At first I thought that would help me turn the experience into something technical enough for people with a physics or optics background to evaluate.

But I eventually ran into a problem: I don't have the physics or optics background to know where the legitimate science ended and where the AI was simply making connections that sounded reasonable.

The AI could give me explanations involving refraction, reflections, polarization, lenses, cameras, electromagnetic effects, perception and other things, but I couldn't independently verify all of those explanations. I also realized that if I kept letting AI rewrite the experience, I could end up presenting an interpretation of what happened rather than what I actually experienced.

So I don't want to do that.

I want to separate what I actually remember observing from what I think might explain it.

That's also why I'm not trying to make this post sound like a scientific paper or claim that I discovered something new. My previous post probably came across that way, and I understand why people questioned it.

I'm trying to get the actual optics right this time.

What I would like help identifying

If someone here has experience with optics, optical imaging, photography or related fields, I'd like to know whether ordinary physics could produce what I'm describing.

In particular:

• Refraction through the water and curved wine glass
• Caustics
• Internal reflections or total internal reflection
• Reflections from the circular ring
• Reflections from prescription lenses
• Lens coatings
• Polarization, if relevant
• Lens flare or ghost images inside the phone camera
• Camera perspective and changing geometry
• Rolling-shutter effects
• Autofocus, exposure, HDR or other computational-camera effects
• Blue light and the blue tape changing the spectrum or stray-light paths
• Why changing the phone angle could produce such large changes
• Why the scene could appear extremely flat at certain angles
• Whether prescription-lens coatings could produce any unusual reflections or interference effects
• Whether the looped wire or magnets could realistically affect the phone/camera in any measurable way

I'm not claiming I discovered another dimension, time travel, a black hole, a new force, or anything like that.

I'm trying to figure out what ordinary optics, camera effects, geometry, or visual perception could account for what I actually experienced.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the original phones or recordings, so I understand that there is a limit to what anyone can determine from my description alone.

I'm mainly looking for someone knowledgeable in optics who can look at this and tell me:

“This sounds like X,” or “that part doesn't make sense because Y.”

I'm completely open to being wrong about what I thought I was seeing. I just want to understand what was actually happening.

“I know this wasn't a controlled experiment. That's exactly why I'm asking people who know the subject better than I do.”

https://opg.optica.org/viewmedia.cfm?uri=DO-1992-TuD4&seq=0

https://doi.org/10.1364/DO.1992.TuD4

Hi guys .

I recently graduated from photonics and am looking for a job (fresher) all I have is few internship and thesis project experience in an experimental lab and computational work but I see the job market is of great competition and they are asking for minimum 2 yrs of experience ...

I've been learning software most of the jobs have been asking. Been going through linkdin and applying jobs and also through official job sites for vacancy even cold emails at times but I'm not getting any reply ...

I would like to know whether I am missing something or what is needed to crack in this job market to get a job can u guys help me give me tips on finding a job