Curated optical setups

Real interferometer layouts and lab techniques, each with the background physics, an honest note on what OpticalSetup's qualitative tracer won't show you, and a locked live canvas to click through. Reviewed for pedagogical accuracy, unlike the community section.

Featured

OPTICAL SETUP — pulsed component panorama OpticalSetup's own flagship demo: the words "OPTICAL SETUP" traced entirely in live pulsed light, exercising nearly every category in the co…

Lens Physics

Why a real lens has no focal point One collimated bundle through an ideal lens and through a real N-BK7 singlet of the same focal length — a point against a 30 mm smear. Singlet vs achromat — axial colour Two f = 40 mm prescriptions under the same 400–750 nm beam: one glass spreads the spectrum along the axis, two glasses fold it back. Sphere, asphere, and the lens that does not exist Three 1-inch lenses of the same 25 mm focal length under one 20 mm monochromatic bundle: a perfect point, a 7.5 mm smear, and a point again.

Microscopy Implementations

Multimodal multiphoton microscope One femtosecond beam, two contrast mechanisms: second-harmonic generation for non-centrosymmetric structure and two-photon fluorescence for … Coherent Raman microscope Two synchronised picosecond beams beating at a molecular vibration, read out three ways: stimulated Raman loss, forward CARS, and epi-CARS.

Optics Bench

Michelson interferometer One beamsplitter, two mirror arms, one recombined output — the interferometer behind the Michelson–Morley experiment and, scaled up four kil… Mach–Zehnder interferometer Two beamsplitters, two fully separate arms, two output ports — shown three ways: a mechanical delay, a driven phase modulator, and a phase o…

Ultrashort Pulses

Ultrashort pulse chirping The same 150 fs pulse measured three ways — bare, chirped by 100 mm of dense flint, and recompressed — each on its own autocorrelator.