Garrett Cole
Thorlabs Inc, USAFor advancements in precision optical metrology, namely the pioneering development and successful commercialization of novel substrate-transferred crystalline optical interference coatings.
As a child, Garrett Cole lived very near Moffett Field, an active naval base in northern California at that time. From his backyard, he could watch air shows, including the acrobatic feats of the Blue Angels, with the 1986 annual show being a standout memory, featuring the Italian demonstration team, Frecce Tricolori, and the German Navy's Vikings. Another advantage of the proximity to Moffett was easy access to NASA Ames Research Center, where his father (who owned a furniture upholstery shop) would take him to open houses, where Garrett explored the inspiring scientific advances on display. In high school, Garrett’s stepfather taught him about machining, working with CNC mills and Computer-Aided Design software. These formative experiences laid the groundwork for a very unique career path.
Garrett attended an undergraduate-focused institution, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, which provided a thorough and hands-on education for his Bachelor’s Degree in Materials Engineering. Many of his peers went straight into positions in industry, but Garrett went in a different direction. He joined Noel MacDonald’s and John Bowers’ groups at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) for a PhD in 2001, continuing his study of materials science and engineering. With the dynamic entrepreneurial spirit at UCSB, many peers sought careers at startups, a path that Garrett also followed. In 2005, one of these start-ups, Aerius Photonics, hired him as their first employee, producing compact laser arrays for ranging systems. Garrett shares, “This is one of the examples where we were developing awesome technology that came too soon…there wasn’t an immediate high-volume use case without today’s autonomous vehicles or smartphones, AR/VR, and so on.”
Garrett left Aerius, which was ultimately acquired by FLIR, and returned to more basic research, joining Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he continued down an engineering-focused path and worked to use the same lasers from his PhD and Aerius, but now applying them to gas sensing as opposed to communications and distance measurements. Reading the scientific literature, he became aware of fundamental research taking place in Austria that was related to his own applied efforts and decided to reach out. After all, he thought, “What’s the worst they could do, ignore me?” The team in Austria was responsive, and Garrett began collaborating with Markus Aspelmeyer at the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information on cavity optomechanics. Eventually, this collaboration turned into a job offer, and Garrett moved with his wife to Vienna in 2008.
In Vienna, he continued working in the same area but in a purely academic role. At the time, cavity optomechanics was an emerging field, and Garrett enjoyed transitioning into the fundamental research side of things. However, his engineering mind was always at work, looking for ways to optimize and perfect the mirrors at the core of the experiments, advancing the state-of-the-art, and exploring potential applications. It wasn’t long before others took notice of the mirror technology’s potential to solve a long-standing problem in precision metrology and gravitational wave detection. Researchers from these areas started to ask Garrett about the availability of such low-loss mirrors and inquired about potential products. After validating the technology and building up the requisite intellectual property, in 2012, he took the leap and founded his start-up, Crystalline Mirror Solutions (CMS), together with Markus Aspelmeyer.
As professional and personal obstacles grew in Vienna, notably limited semiconductor fab capabilities requiring him to spend significant time away from his wife and infant daughter, returning home to California seemed like the best solution for his next chapter. The family moved back to California, and Garrett set up manufacturing and US operations for CMS in 2014. Over the next five years, the company grew from the two co-founders and early staff to 15 employees operating at three locations, supplying high-performance mirrors to internationally renowned academic groups, metrology labs, and commercial customers. Building the company and expanding its capabilities was a stressful yet exciting endeavor. Thorlabs ultimately acquired CMS in December 2019 and today “Thorlabs Crystalline Solutions” operates as the company’s sole California-based group, continuing to produce cutting-edge precision laser optics in Santa Barbara.
Today, Garrett summarizes his work, “We use semiconductor materials and processing techniques to manufacture ultrahigh-performance optics for optical metrology systems. These “semiconductor supermirrors” enable record performance time and distance measuring systems, owing to the minimal Brownian noise, or fundamental thermo-mechanical fluctuations, of the mirror materials.” He shares that the current challenge is to expand the operating wavelengths of these mirrors into both the visible and mid-infrared spectral regions and to increase the size of the mirrors, which would lead to dramatic improvements in performance in gravitational wave astronomy.
With such a wide range of experiences, Garrett has a unique perspective to share with younger scientists. While many may perceive becoming a CEO and founding a company as glamorous, he encourages people to think more holistically about the process: “When the company has just a few people, you're going to be covering the whole spectrum from CEO to janitor. Resources will be exceedingly limited in that setting, and you’ll have to fight for and carefully use every single penny.” In his experience, trusting his gut instinct while being sure to think quantitatively about each problem has led to the most rewarding decisions. Garrett encourages others to do the same.
Photo Credit: Garrett Cole
Profile written by Samantha Hornback
Above: Every Halloween, Garrett enjoys a unique hobby: Extreme Pumpkin Carving. Each year, family and friends clamor to see the next design, and Garrett tries his best to exceed their expectations. Some recent highlights include a bear, sarcophagus, and squid.
