Quantum education lab qp-tech at ACP headed by Dr. Rudrakant Sollapur.

Experimental Optics Course (1st semester)

The experimental optics courses teaches hands-on lab experience and also offers some remotely controllable setups for teaching purposes.

Quantum education lab qp-tech at ACP headed by Dr. Rudrakant Sollapur.

Image: Fraunhofer IOF Jena

Having extensive hands-on experience is one of the most valuable professional attributes a true optics and photonics expert must possess. To strengthen your laboratory experience from the very beginning of your Master's degree program, the ASP provides an experimental optics course, where high-level experiments can be performed using exclusive research-grade components and equipment. The laboratory equipment contains continuous-wave and pulsed lasers and allows for training in interferometry, linear and nonlinear spectroscopy, optical time-domain reflectometry, and optical tweezing, to name a few. These techniques were selected with respect to their educational value and devised by ASP's senior scientists and academic tutors. They are fully operated by ASP Master's degree students.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Fundamentals

Various optical phenomena like refraction, reflection, and total internal reflection are investigated in this experiment.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Adaptive Optics

Adaptive optics is widely used in optical systems like telescopes and microscopes for dynamic correction of wavefront distortions. Currently, adaptive optical components also become important for high power lasers, beam and pulse shaping.

Screenshot: Falko Sojka

Adaptive Optics (XRTL online version)

This Extended Reality Twin Lab (XRTL) version of the Adaptive Optics setup provides a full-scale, remotely controllable experiment integrated in the regular curriculum and is mainly used by online Master students.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Fabry-Perot Interferometer

The Fabry-Perot interferometer arrangement acts as an optical resonator which may result in an extremely high spectral resolving power.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

He-Ne Laser

A helium-neon laser is a gas laser, consisting of a mixture of helium and neon gas in a ratio between 5:1 and 20:1 bound in a glass tube.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Michelson Interferometer

The basic Michelson interferometer setup uses any kind of beam splitter to divide one beam of light into two beams, each of them back-reflected to the beam splitter and recombined and directed to the fourth arm where any kind of detector is placed.

Image: Jari Domke and Falko Sojka.

Michelson Interferometer (XRTL online version)

This Extended Reality Twin Lab (XRTL) version of the Michelson Interferometer provides a full-scale, remotely controllable inteferometric setup integrated in the regular curriculum and is mainly used by online Master students.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Nd:YAG Laser

We perform Q-switching on our solid-state (Nd:YAG-) laser to modulate of the internal gain/losses of the laser cavity in order to achieve high peak power and short pulse duration.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Spectroscopy

This setup aims at the fundamental principle of spectroscopy which is to investigate the properties of materials using light.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Optical Gyroscope

Laser gyroscopes are optical instruments for measuring the angular velocity based on the Sagnac-effect. In combination with accelerometers, they allow position and direction estimation by the dead reckoning technique.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Optical Time Domain Reflectometry

Optical Time Domain Reflectometry (OTDR) can, among others, provide information about attenuation of a fiber, the splice quality inside the network and connection losses between two fibers.

Optical tweezing setup in the experimental optics course.

Image: Jan-Peter Kasper (University of Jena)

Optical Tweezers

Micrometer sized particles can be trapped and moved by strongly focused light due to reflection and refraction of the incident photons. The effect can be used to control and manipulate transparent microscopic particles like polymer microspheres, microorganisms or cells.