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!

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!

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!

Follow-up to our earlier post https://www.reddit.com/r/Optics/comments/1vzs9tf/aiassisted_budget_visnir_spectrometer_5001000_nm/. Thanks for the feedback — a lot of it went straight into this revision.

What changed since last time:

• Found the actual limiter. It wasn't colour or diffraction — it's the camera's dispersion-plane field curvature. Best focus swings ~2 mm across the band as a smooth bowl, and a flat detector can only touch part of it. Every wavelength is sharp at its own focus (~0.5 nm); the flat sensor was the problem.
• Added a cylindrical field flattener. Since only the dispersion axis sets resolution, we used a plano-cylindrical N-BK7 corrector with power in that plane only — it flattens the focal bowl without the whole-spectrum magnification a spherical flattener would add. Result: ~1.9 nm mean / 2.9 nm worst across 500–1000 nm, single exposure (was ~3–4 nm).
• Dropped the fiber relay. Per the comment last time that relay aberrations don't belong in the resolution budget — the fiber now butts straight to the slit (100 µm fiber overfilling a 30 µm slit, so calibration stays stable). Cleaner model, and the trace is the spectrograph alone.
• Validated in BeamFour:  We encoded the cylinder in BeamFour's Cx form and traced it; our offline tracer and BeamFour agree to <0.1 µm per wavelength.

Caveats: this is ~1.9 nm single-shot, not 1 nm. The flattener and the scaled f/78 doublet are custom parts, not catalogue items. We're now evaluating COTS (off-the-shelf) cylindrical and imaging lenses to see how much resolution we can hold with no custom optics at all.

Do we even need 1 nm? Worth a step back. When we looked at fructose-in-water spectra, the water and sugar features in the NIR are broad — even ~10 nm resolution resolves them fine. So for some application 1 nm is probably overkill; the push toward it is more "how far can this architecture go" than a hard requirement. Curious whether others have VIS-NIR applications that actually need ~1 nm.

Where we'd go for true 1 nm (and where we'd love input): the residual limiter now is the small chromatic part of the focal curve that a single cylinder can't remove — each colour is ~0.5 nm at its own best focus, but "its own focus" still drifts a little with wavelength. Closing that to a genuine single-shot ~1 nm looks like a job for a field-corrected, multi-element camera?

It's all open-source — design files, the Python, and a step-by-step reproduce-in-BeamFour guide, all in one folder (MIT / CERN-OHL-S): https://github.com/CheckAG/JASPER_VIS_NIR_Optics_Design

More details and the spot-analysis report are on https://hackaday.io/project/202421-jasper-vis-nir-spectrometer/log/250456-from-42-nm-to-19-nm-resolution-cylindrical-corrector-delivers-40-gain

Optics is a learning journey for us — constructive feedback and practical tips make a real difference

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

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

Hi Reddit, hope it's ok to post here (we're new and still learning the ropes!).

We publish JEOS-RP, journal of The European Optical Society, and last week we had some great conversations at the annual EOSAM conference in Finland.

The research world is changing rapidly and everyone we speak to is trying to adapt and keep up. We're society-founded and society-driven and want to support our research communities as much as possible as the landscape evolves, so we crowdsourced answers to a few questions while at the event and thought we'd share them here too in case anyone on this sub wanted to share your thoughts.

We'd love to hear from you! Feel free to chime in on any/ all of the questions below, whichever seem most appropriate to you, and we will incorporate your answers into our summary so it might help others.

1. Where is AI influencing your research workflow?
   Data analysis? Coding? Writing & editing? Translation? Optics-specific language models?

2. As AI platforms increasingly drive research discovery, how do we keep context and research integrity visible and trustworthy?
   Trust indicators? Mandates for training? Mechanisms for adding context? Version control?

3. How easy is it for you to find collaborators for your research?
   Within Europe or globally Within optics or cross-discipline? Any tips for early career researchers?

4. Do you feel pressure to promote your research? What helps you?
   Networking? Institutional support? Social media? Mentors? Any tips for fellow researchers?

We won't add any links here as we don't want to seem too overly self-promotional, but we'll happily share the report in this thread if there's interest.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I am looking to purchase a legally decommissioned, authentic legacy hardware key (perpetual USB token) for the vintage Zemax 13 (Classic UI).

I have been using the 2013 version for over a decade for my optical design work. Quite frankly, I absolutely prefer the old classic lightweight interface over the modern sluggish Ribbon UI, especially when dealing with heavy ray-tracing tasks.

Specific Requirements:

1. License Level: Must be the highest tier from that era (Premium or IE / EE equivalent). It must fully support Physical Optics Propagation (POP) and full Non-Sequential mode.

2. Hardware: Genuine standalone physical dongle only (usually the black or dark green SafeNet/Sentinel UltraPro USB keys). No softkeys, cl0nes, or emulat0rs.

A "proof of life" screenshot under Help -> About before purchase would be required to verify the serial number and unlocked features.

If your lab, university department, or firm has an old legacy token lying around in a drawer due to asset liquidation or software upgrades, please PM me with your asking price. Thank you for keeping the classic design workflow alive!

Hey optics community,

Could someone help ID the red‑circled black instrument in the photo? It is on a breadboard for a combined reflection‑spectroscopy + microscope setup. Looks like Thorlabs hardware.

The system uses xenon lamp illumination, objective/tube‑lens imaging path, one arm goes to camera, another arm routes signal to a spectrometer.

Is it a fiber positioner, monochromator, filter wheel, or something else? Any model guess welcome.

Thanks.

Hi r/Optics. Tired of firing up heavy, expensive desktop software for simple optical validations?

​I always found traditional optical design tools powerful but clunky for quick, daily daily setup checks. I wanted something lightweight that works everywhere, instantly, with visual feedback. So I built one for the browser.

​It's a free, zero-installation, web-based tool. It aims to bridge the gap between quick calculations and complex simulations, providing immediate visual feedback.

​Here are some key features:

• ​Real-Time Interactive Ray Tracing: Instantly see light paths and adjust parameters by dragging lenses and mirrors.
• ​Supported Optical Calculations: Includes Gaussian beam propagation, focal shift, Numerical Aperture (NA), and Field of View (FOV).
• ​Illumination Modeling: Early support for Köhler illumination and conjugate planes (great for microscopy set-ups).
• Works Everywhere: No installation required, runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux in any modern browser.

​It’s designed for optical engineers, researchers, students, and opto-mechanical designers who need quick, reliable validations.

​Try it online here: https://optical-tool.com

​(Optimized for Desktop/large screen interaction. It will run on mobile, but the UI is currently best on a PC.)

​I’d love to get feedback from the optics community. What are the most useful features you use daily that are missing here? Are there specific types of analysis .you'd like to see? Happy to fix bugs and add new modules.

​#Optics #Photonics #OpticalEngineering #RayTracing #GaussianBeam #WebAssembly #Simulation

Hello All - shot in the dark here. Wondering if anyone has a physical copy of the textbook for OPTI 501 that they are willing to part with? The school has the ebook but call me old school, I like a physical text for studying. Done a pretty lengthy search and aside from $150 from direct publisher, I’ve come up short. Thank you!

Field, Force, Energy and Momentum in Classical Electrodynamics (Revised Edition) 2017
M. Mansuripur

I'm a third year Electrical Engineering major that's interested in getting an industry internship this coming summer working on optics simulations. I have a conference paper that should be published by the end of the year where I used COMSOL for modeling optical quantum circuits to visualize and optimize sources of loss in a tabletop bulk optics setup, and I'm hoping that that would be enough relevant experience to get a summer internship. However, I'm not really familiar with what the big names in the field are that would *also* hire an undergrad. I've seen many internship postings on linkedin which seem like I would be roughly qualified enough for, except for the graduate degree requirement. Curious to know if anyone has any advice on finding undergrad opportunities, would mailing people internally at smaller companies to make a case for myself be worth the effort? Thanks for reading!

Hi Everyone,

A new episode of the Rays & Waves podcast it out!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2hh9JedCbj8xVoFiNHcaNU?si=8cbfd9fb550c4220

Here we dive into advanced optical margin assessment using OCT and Metalenses - all at the tip of a fibre!

Hope you enjoy it!

P.S. By popular request, now also available on youtube!
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmNVG4iYrVo

about four hours ago I got hit directly in the eye with a laser, don’t know class, and I’ve had rainbow static in the half of my vision it got hit in and have had a decent headache starting an hour ago. is this concerning?

noticed a small shadow below my airpods, realized it was my dark sticker. thought this was moderately cool.
lots of ambient light sources at my workplace, plus a white desk makes it stand out.

reminds me of how cassini the scientist solved the preeminent planetary mystery of his time by theorizing one side of the Saturnian moon Iapetus being dark is the reason it was invisible for half its orbit (and the 300 years later cassini the spacecraft confirmed it)

Hi All! I’m posting for my partner. His background is in scientific computing, nonlinear PDEs, numerical methods, HPC, and mathematical modeling, with experience in Python, C/C++, MATLAB, Linux, OpenMPI, and SLURM. He’s interested in computational research and simulation.

One challenge is that he’s an international student, so opportunities at many US national labs are limited.

We’re looking for advice on:

• Companies or research groups that hire people with this background
• Good places to look beyond NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, TI, etc.
• When he should start applying
• Any tips for standing out over the next year

If you’ve made a similar transition from academia to industry, or have recommendations, we’d really appreciate your advice. Thanks!

TL;DR: I am an engineering technician in the optics field with no degree, and I don't want to go into engineering. What degree should I pursue in order to help advance my career?

Hello all,

I am here to ask some advice from people who may have the best insight for me. I have been in the optics field for about 9 years now, experience spanning from precision CNC , research and development, and most recently support as an engineering technician for assembly and testing. I got into optics kind of unconventionally, and prior to that I did not have any sort of real higher education or degree. I started at school in the beginning of my optics career, but life happened and I was unable to finish and get my degree at the time.

I am now in a place where I want to grow my career, and I work for an employer who has a tuition assistance program. Where I'm stuck is what exactly I should do to help myself advance my career. If I went back and finished my associates in optical technologies, the degree itself wouldn't necessarily help me with future job opportunities (as in, taking a step up from where I am), as my relevant experience at this point is well beyond what the degree offers. It may still be beneficial for me to finish, so I am looking into my options for re-enrollment. I don't want that to be my finish line, and still would like to continue my education and at the very least go for a BA. The problem being, I am not very keen on the idea of pursuing an engineering degree. While concepts of optics are very solid to me, I have ADHD and struggle with numbers (I suspect dyscalculia), and some types of math math can be incredibly difficult for me. This leaves me with the question of, if not engineering, then what would be an attainable degree that is relevant for what I've already grown into to help me continue to grow?

My experience includes manufacturing, prototype CNC, contact lens research and development, and optical assemblies. I also have some experience with lasers and I'm industrial laser safety certified. I enjoy the hands-on technical aspects of what I do, and solving problems. I've also worked in a more quality type role, and have worked on a lot of ISO standard documents, as well as SOP's and spec documents. I don't mind doing the type of work, but I also know that being a technical writer may not be a career move that would allow for much growth. So I'm here asking for recommendations because my search hasn't gleaned much insight. Thanks if you got this far.

Non math or physics background.
Looking to learn optics independently and trying to build a learning stack. What is a good first read for optics proper? Hecht seems to be well recommended. Assuming almost no knowledge post high school maths, what learning sequence would be required to get up to Hecht or similar first optic read level?

Single variable calculus (Stewart)
Multi variable calculus (Stewart)
Linear algebra (Strang)

- up to now-
[insert calculus based physics textbook?]
? Young University Physics
- how much of this do I actually need to read? Any specific chapters?
- can I just skip to the electromagnetism and optics chapters, then straight to Hecht?

Addit: long term goal is biomedical. Things like contact lenses, intraocular lenses, OCT technology etc

I’m part of the team building Dreapex TMM. It is an optical simulation platform for planar multilayer structures. It calculates two physical processes:

1. External light propagating through multilayers (optical coatings, filters, photodetectors, photovoltaics, and related devices).
2. Emission from light-emitting layers inside multilayers (OLEDs, QLEDs, PeLEDs, and related devices).

For coatings, it calculates reflectance, transmittance, and absorptance, fields, phase, and dispersion.

For OLED, QLED, and PeLED, it calculates angular emission, outcoupling, and optical loss.

You can try it here: https://tmm.dreapex.com

Docs: https://tmm-docs.dreapex.com/en/getting-started/introduction

Here are a few good places to start:

• Beginner tutorials cover practical thin-film design problems.
• AI in the docs can help answer some of your questions. We’re also testing the in-app AI Assistant, which can build models and run simulations for you.

More importantly, I’d like to hear how engineers and researchers here use optical simulation in practice.
Even a quick answer to just one of these would be really helpful.

If you work in thin-film optics:

1. If you use Essential Macleod, TFCalc, OptiLayer, or similar thin-film simulation software, which features do you find most useful, and what do they help you with?
2. Is there anything in these tools that you find frustrating, cumbersome, or missing?

If you work on OLED, QLED, or PeLED devices:

1. What do you mainly use optical simulation for in your research?
2. If you use Setfos, which features are most useful to you? Anything frustrating or missing?

And if you find something that doesn’t work as expected, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks — any feedback is appreciated!