“Inside Photonics”

OPTOMAN and the Center for Physical Sciences and Technology take students inside the coating lab with the new series “Inside Photonics”.

A five-part series on how the optical coatings behind high-power lasers are made and how you find out if they actually work. 

You can learn a lot about optical coatings from a textbook. You can learn about thin films, interference, and deposition methods. But none of that quite prepares you for standing next to the machine that actually makes the coating.  That’s the idea behind”Inside Photonics”, a new five-part video series from OPTOMAN and the Center for Physical Sciences and Technology. The first episode goes live on 24 September, taking viewers inside the Center for Physical Sciences and Technology’s optical coatings laboratory and OPTOMAN’s manufacturing facility in Vilnius. 

The series is made for physics and engineering students, and anyone who knows the theory but wants to see what happens when it leaves the page and enters the lab. And there is plenty to see. The Center for Physical Sciences and Technology has sputtering, evaporation, and atomic layer deposition (ALD) equipment side by side, making it possible to compare different coating technologies in real life, rather than just on a slide.  

You can learn the physics of different coating methods from a textbook. “Inside Photonics” gives you a preview of these machines. You can see the lab, the equipment, and the people who actually run it, explaining it in their own words.

Says Domantas Klumbys, Technical Marketing Manager at OPTOMAN.

There’s also a new guide for the series: Coatingus, an optical wizard from the Center for Physical Sciences and Technology who turns plain glass into high-performance optics and passes on what he learns to the next generation. Coatingus is the latest character in OPTOMAN’s comic-book universe and part of the company’s  SuperHero League, an initiative that brings a bit more personality and fun to photonics outreach and events.   

We are inviting all curious people to see our high-tech coating labs and feel the science we do here.

Says Dr. Lina Grinevičiūtė, Senior Researcher at the Center for Physical Sciences and Technology.

Each main episode is around five to seven minutes, combining animation with footage from the real labs. Shorter explainers, under 90 seconds each, will break down individual concepts without turning them into another university lecture. The first episode of “Inside Photonics” launches on 24 September, with the remaining episodes released throughout the series. Subscribe to the OPTOMAN YouTube channel to follow the series.