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Cluster 5: Photonics: Light-based Technologies in Everyday Life

Week 1

MONDAY: Introductions + Reflection and Refraction

After a long 1-mile walk to the Jacobs school of Engineering building, we were introduced to our professors, Dr. Sahar and Dr. Peter, as well as our amazing teaching fellows, Mr. Patterson, Chanae, and Daiwei. In the morning, Dr. Sahar gave an insightful lecture about just how broad the scope of the photonics field is. We were instructed about lab and laser safety for our upcoming labs. In the afternoon, we had our first aforementioned lab on refraction, where we learned about Snell's law of refraction, and applied our knowledge by performing an experiment to calculate the critical angle needed for light to undergo total internal reflection through a prism, working with real prisms in our photonics lab.

Meeting Dr. Sahar and Dr. Peter

Our first lab

Preparing for COSMOLYMPICS!

TUESDAY: Ethics + Spectrometry

On Tuesday, Mr. Patterson introduced us to the Ethics video competition, and we began forming teams and brainstorming ethics topics related to photonics. We then toured Dr. Seungeun Oh's lab, where we saw laser imaging used in detecting protein and lipid mass, volume, and density in cells. In the afternoon, we learned about spectrometry and diffraction angles from Dr. Peter Illinykh, and performed a lab to compare the resolving power of two different spectrometry methods, a prism and a grating.

All of us locked in on the Ethics Project

Staring at rainbows in the spectrometry lab

WEDNESDAY: Photon Lecture & Simulation Download + Diffraction Lab

On Wednesday, Dr. Sahar gave us a lecture on different sources of light, such as incandescent and line sources. We toured Dr. Yuhwa Lo's lab, where we saw the tools they used to probe transistors for making photodetectors. For our afternoon lab, we learned about single slit, double slit, and multislit diffraction, as well as diffraction patterns formed by apertures of different shapes. We further performed experiments to observe diffraction patterns formed by single and double slit apertures, a pixelated camera, and a strand of hair.

IT issues downloading Lumerical D:

Some of us downloaded software for laser cutting in the meantime :)

Dr. Yuhwa Lo's lab tour (above)

Staring at rainbows pt. 2 Electric Boogaloo: Looking at the emission spectrum of literally everything (left and above) via diffraction grating

Intermission

THURSDAY: Ethics + Solar Cells

We kicked off the day continuing to work on ethics projects, starting to make our presentations and recording videos. Afterwards, we met our former cluster professor, Dr. Charles Tu! He shared some words of inspiration and insight into the field of photonics, drawing on his experience working at TSMC. After lunch, we rushed back to the lab to make blackberry juice dye-sensitized solar cells. Our best group got a cell to generate a power of 0.4 mW, which is 0.08 times the power of a standard phone charger.