What is Optics?
Optics: : [op-tiks] - noun
What is Optics?
The science of light. The study of the eye and vision. Lasers. Telescopes. Microscopes. What makes the sky blue, how rainbows form, and why stars twinkle. Manufacturing computer chips. Environmental monitoring and more every day.
Syn.: Photonics (in the context of engineering)
About Optica
Optics includes the study of electromagnetic radiation (for example, light and infrared radiation), its interactions with matter and instruments used to gather information due to these interactions. It also includes the study of sight.
Optics and photonics are what our members do.
They're making life better every day through the science of light.
Jason Eichenholz
Product Development
Luminar Technologies
As a serial entrepreneur, I focus on the commercialization of optics and photonics technologies to solve challenging problems to change the world. I have leveraged my technical and business acumen to find new market opportunities that have enabled a variety of applications from autonomous vehicles, battlefield explosives sensors, early cancer detection, new drug delivery systems, and environmental studies from the depths of the oceans to the top of Mt. Everest and even on the Moon and Mars.
Ulrike Fuchs
Optical Systems
Asphericon
At asphericon, I am involved in many research and development projects for customers, from optical and mechanical design, to manufacturing of optical components, to integration and subsequent testing. Again and again, this is an exciting and thrilling process, which fascinates me by its elegant solutions utilizing light.
Sile Nic Chormaic
Atomic physics & more
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology
I look at the interaction of light with very small particles, even down to the size of atoms. My fascination with optics is that light itself has so many wonderful hidden secrets waiting to be discovered, but it also allows us to understand what is around us by using it as a tool to study systems in chemistry, biology, and neuroscience, to name just a few areas. Light is life!
Herbert Winful
Lasers
University of Michigan
I do research in nonlinear optics, which deals with how intense laser light modifies the properties of materials and is in turn affected by those changes. It makes it possible for light to generate harmonics or overtones of itself and is also the basis for generating intense ultrashort pulses in a process called mode locking.
