Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Quantum Photo-Science Laboratory
Date Created: June 12, 2021
Updated: April 8, 2025
Lesson 1: Basic Optical Elements and Beam Alignment
Lesson 2: Introduction to Programming and Data Analysis
Lesson 3: FTIR Spectroscopy and Fabry-Pérot Cavities
Lesson 4: Introduction to Pulsed Laser Alignment and Nonlinear Optics
The documents here are for the instructor. These five lessons are a rapid introduction to the fundamental optics and equipment used in an optics laboratory. Each lesson is to be completed in about one week. Students are encouraged to work together to solve problems and build setups from scratch. It is very important that the instructor let the students struggle with the problems on their own and not give answers right away.
There are essentially two tracks: using a self-contained spectrometer (FTIR) and an open optics setup. If there are enough students, you can make two groups and put them on different tracks and then switch.
Just as in sports or music, drills are used to reinforce fundamental skills. Think shooting basketball free throws or playing scales on the piano. In optics, the fundamental skill is laser alignment. It starts easy with a small red laser, a couple of mirrors, and a couple of irises. Lessons progress to include more complex optical components, including nonlinear crystals. The ultimate goal is to be able to understand and work with pulsed lasers. The nonlinear aspect of pulsed lasers opens up totally new phenomena with different optical components. This hardest tutorial has students find the laser pulse width using cross correlation via second harmonic generation (SHG) using a nonlinear crystal. The instructor should discuss nonlinear theory.
The linear spectroscopy tutorial is experimentally simple, but introduces data analysis and fitting techniqes using data collected with an FTIR. Here, the instructor provides a set of clear liquid samples. The students do not know what the molecules are (but are labeled with numbers), and students must use a Fabry-Pérot etalon to calculate the material refractive index of the samples to determine what molecule they have.
For larger groups students may be separated into separate tracks, where one group does the pulsed laser tutorial first and linear spectroscopy second, while the other group does these tutorials in reverse order. Lesson 1 must be done for everyone before moving on. An introduction to data analysis should be done in conjunction with the pulsed laser and FTIR tutorials.
The data analysis portion of these tutorials are in a separate GitHub repository and are to be given to students when they begin analysis.
After students complete an experiment lesson, they will analyze their results using Julia. It is important not only for students to develop skills in data analysis, but also to learn basic programming skills. This includes of course the basics like loops, conditionals, functions, etc. This also includes good pragramming practices and using standard practices for the language, Julia in this case. Make sure you review the Julia manual to make sure that you are familiar with best practices and ask questions on the Julia Discourse forum if you are unsure of something. The Julia community (as are many open source programming communities, generally) friendly and open to newcomers.
Use the bash script in the scripts folder to generate a PDf file.
On macOS:
zsh makepdf.sh