News & Events

Interdisciplinary team created system for Innovative Freshman Experience class First-year students Lisa Enochs and Andrew Cochrane work on their Innovative Freshman Experience project. A multidisciplinary team of first-year Rochester Institute of Technology students has been steadily working toward a singular goal since the fall: to develop an imaging system that can reveal information hidden in historical documents. The students are developing the multispectral imaging system for their Innovative Freshmen Experience...Continue Reading

MICHELLE STARR8 MAY 2020, Sciencealert.com Jupiter is not a serene place. The giant planet is wracked with tempestuous storms, wide bands of roiling cloud that encircle the entire globe, extending to depths many times thicker than the atmospheric distance between Earth and space. The gas giant’s wild weather is so different from what happens on Earth that astronomers have struggled to understand it. But we just got another piece of...Continue Reading

By: Ryan F. Mandelbaum, Gizmodo.com Astronomers and physicists continue to pursue the answers to the universe’s deepest questions, but on many matters, including dark matter and dark energy, they are stymied. What if an autonomously operating telescope, free from human biases and complications, could find the solutions we’ve been missing? Today, humans steer observatories around the sky by pointing them toward single objects, or, more often, moving between a list...Continue Reading

ROCHESTER, N.Y., April 28, 2020 — New York has been the hardest hit state in the most affected country in the world due to the novel coronavirus. With the photonics and optics industry deemed essential business by the state government, several companies have responded by shifting supply manufacturing or aiding employees and families with paid sick time and supplying sanitizers and face masks. Notably, Sydor Optics upped its manufacturing of...Continue Reading

Two scientists at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE)—Valeri Goncharov and Petros Tzeferacos—have received funding awards from the US Department of Energy (DOE) for research in fusion energy. The DOE recently announced the winners of $32 million in funding for 15 projects as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy’s (ARPA-E) Breakthroughs Enabling THermonuclear-fusion Energy (BETHE) program. These projects will “work to develop timely, commercially viable fusion...Continue Reading

Source: Thomas M. Baer and Christina E. Baer As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the world, patients, technicians and scientists depend on state-of-the-art molecular-analysis instruments as they fight against SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing this disease. Optics and photonics technologies embedded in these instruments—such as high-quantum-efficiency multispectral cameras, visible-light laser diodes and LEDs, infrared bolometer arrays, narrowband optical filters and wideband multispectral optical spectrometers—play an essential part in the story. Whether...Continue Reading

Source: Stanford School of Engineering Electrical engineers working on shrinking the mechanical and electronic components in a rooftop lidar down to a single silicon chip think the component could be mass produced for as little as a few hundred dollars. Share: Engineers and business leaders have been working on autonomous cars for years, but there’s one big obstacle to making them cheap enough to become commonplace: They’ve needed a way...Continue Reading

Laser Focus World’s compiled list of links to optics/photonics company, university, and other institutions’ statements on COVID-19 shows that safety is paramount, and the industry is crucial to solving pandemic problems. By John Wallace Covid Company Responses To help keep Laser Focus World’s audience up to date on the state of the optics and photonics industry in the age of the coronavirus, we have compiled a list of links to...Continue Reading

By Anne Fischer **Link to Original Article** Plastics have only been around since the 1950s and yet they’re everywhere: scattered in our lakes, rivers, floating on the top of oceans, and dropping to the bottom. Back in the 1950s and 60s, plastics were hailed as a useful invention, used primarily in packaging materials. Remember Tupperware parties and the one-word advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate? Now the...Continue Reading

The defense titan is also offering up its fleet and facilities for relief and response efforts. By:Lou Whiteman **Link to Original Article** Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) said Friday morning that the company intends to advance more than $50 million to small- and mid-sized suppliers to ensure there are no disruptions in the defense contractor’s supply chain. CEO Marillyn Hewson said in a statement that while the company “will continue to protect...Continue Reading