Multimedia / Photo Contest / 2020
Home Optical Lab
Home Optical Lab

This is my home optical lab. I've inherited almost all the components from a POC project I was doing for my company and then created the home lab having also bought some extra stuff on my own. It's not that impressive in general: few waveplates; beamsplitters, mirrors, filters, AOM's, HeNe and diode lasers, etc. but it did become special during the Covid lockdown. It previously resulted in an interesting formalism for 4 by 4 beamsplitter matrix (pre-print is peer-reviewed). It predicts photon coalescence not only in spatial modes but in polarization as well. The setup that is now on the picture is built to test it. Laser beam is attenuated by set of cross polarizers to get close to non-classical light statistics. It's followed by acousto-optic modulator having several diffraction orders with +1 and -1 treated as correlated ones to resemble the original HOM experiment with nonlinear emission of two down-converted photons. The challenging part is to get the pathlengths from AOM to recombining beamsplitter equal, so 4th order correlation can be observed (just as required by the original HOM experiment). The output legs have polarizing beamsplitters, so 4 beams are produced and shone upon the target plate. The CCD camera above provides back-scattered photon counts via LabView code on the PC. If perfect pathlengths matching is achieved there should be only 2 dots visible, i.e. coalescent in spatial and polarization modes.

—Artem Kryvobok, FLIR Systems, U.S.A.

01 Dec 2020

Nanopainting
Nanopainting

Photorealistic reproduction of the 1665 masterpiece by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, under the form of a metasurface composed of millions of elliptical titanium-dioxide nanopillars of height 600 nm, and varying lateral dimensions and orientations. Scale bar: 50 μm. The “nanopainting” image is generated in transmission under polarized white-light illumination and imaged using a color-CCD camera through a polarizer placed after the metasurface. Reference: P. Huo, M. Song, W. Zhu, C. Zhang, L. Chen, H. J. Lezec, Y. Lu, A. Agrawal and T. Xu, “Photorealistic full-color nanopainting enabled by a low-loss metasurface,” Optica 7, 1171-1172 (2020).

—Admit Agrawal, NIST, U.S.A.

01 Dec 2020

Interference Pattern
Interference Pattern

When light diffracts off small particles or circular aperture, we get an interference pattern in the form of rings. Particle diffraction is used to determine the particle size by analyzing the interference pattern observed. Using one spare mobile camera lens, I placed it on top of my mobile camera lens. Then I added a drop of water on top the camera lens and shone a flash light at certain distance above the setup. Result was the diffraction pattern of the dust particles in the water droplet.

—Swamesh U. Lotlikar, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India

01 Dec 2020

Solar Concentrators
Solar Concentrators

Student project in solar concentrators enhances intensity by a factor of 180 for improving the performance of photovoltaic cells. In the photograph: Itai Hyams submits his project to the course teacher, Prof. Tal Carmon, while solarly cooking marshmallows. Photographer: Zur Lazar

—Itai Hyams, Technion, Israel

01 Dec 2020

When the Light Meets Water
When the Light Meets Water

Caustics together with light dispersion generate fancy patterns. This beauty appeared from combination of two sources of life on our planet - sun light and fresh water. The image has been taken in the beginning of August 2020 on one of the hot (above 30°C) days in Bochum (Germany) with my cell phone camera of 12 Mpx.

—Vira Besaga, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

01 Dec 2020

Nanospheres on a GaAs Wafer
Nanospheres on a GaAs Wafer

Studying the nanospheres layer on a GaAs wafer, we managed to find the lost Hokusai lithograph “Clouds Cast Shadows on the Mountains.” But even if we have deluded ourselves, lithography still has to do with it. A monolayer of dense-packed spheres serves as a mask in our nanolithography method. Sometimes the spheres pack into several layers, and a beautiful picture of thin-film interference opens before us. Leica DM4500 P microscope, St. Petersburg State University, Resource Center “Geomodel”. Details of the method could be found in O.A. Lozhkina et al., Nanodisk fabrication by nanosphere lithography, AIP Conf. Proc. 1748, 030003 (2016). O.A. Lozhkina fabricated the wafer coating, V.V. Shilovskikh made the photo, Yu.V. Kapitonov supervised the lithography project.

—Yury V. Kapitonov, St. Petersburg State University, Russia

01 Dec 2020

Precision Optic Light Art
Precision Optic Light Art

The image is part of my constellation series. I’m using faceted lenses to bend light. The principle of refraction is seen in the image. I shot this hand held with my iPhone in my living room.

—Kyle L. Tate, U.S.A.

01 Dec 2020

Lissajous Curves
Lissajous Curves

Lissajous curves made by harmonic light with long-exposure photography. This picture was taken with a cellphone. We can see the trajectory described by a pendulum with green light using the long-exposure technique.

—Claudia García-Gil, UNAM, Mexico

01 Dec 2020

Imaging of a Landau Levels
Imaging of a Landau Levels

Imaging of a Landau levels of a mono-layer graphene using Mathematica software. This image is published in the Optics Express journal of OSA.

—Asad Hafiz, COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan

01 Dec 2020

Ferris Wheel in Glasgow
Ferris Wheel in Glasgow

A Ferris wheel in Glasgow, photographed through a dual-axis diffraction grating; the constituent wavelengths inside the lighting are dispersed in orthogonal axes to produce a dazzling rainbow light show.

—Kevin J. Mitchell, University of Glasgow, Scotland

01 Dec 2020

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