A new era in the search for exoplanets—and the alien life they might host—has begun. Aboard a SpaceX rocket, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched April 18th 2018. The TESS mission, developed with support from The Kavli Foundation, is led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. Over the next two years, TESS will scan the 200,000 or so nearest and brightest stars to Earth for telltale dimming caused when exoplanets cross their stars' faces.  TESS carries four visible wideband, seven-element, refractive F/1.4 lenses, each with a 34 degree diagonal field of view.  This talk will describe the methods used for the assembly, alignment and test of the optical assemblies. 

Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) is currently developing a package of technologies for enabling laser radar (lidar) systems that will be used to provide 3D vision for self-driving cars. In these systems, an infrared laser beam will be swept across a field of view using a liquid crystal waveguide (LCW) beamsteerer that contains no moving parts. The simplicity of these non-mechanical designs leads to significant advantages in cost, size, and performance. This presentation will include a discussion of the design, testing, and implementation of LCW beamsteerers in an automotive lidar system. It will also include a brief description of various potential lidar architectures based on LCW devices.

I will discuss the design and use of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) deformable mirror products for wavefront control and modulation. The focus of this talk will be Boston Micromachines Corporation’s (BMC) award-winning deformable mirror technology and the applications that take advantage of their high speed and compact form factor. By applying wavefront correction, deformable mirrors can be used in a variety of applications which include laser beam shaping, microscopy, astronomy, free-space optical communication and vision science. BMC’s intensity modulation products enable low power modulation of broadband light for free-space optical links and can be used to replace AOM and EOM technology in sub-MHz applications.

Monte Carlo ray-tracing computer programs, which simulate the propagation of light through three-dimensional computer models, have their origin in the 1960s. Progress in Monte Carlo ray-tracing software has proceeded on three fronts since then, in the fields of optical design and analysis, the radiation transfer part of the thermal analysis problem, and in photorealistic computer graphics rendering. We will trace the history of the Monte Carlo method from its roots in numerical experiments beginning in ancient times. We will follow through to modern-day software for design and analysis of imaging and non-imaging optical systems, as well as the production of photorealistic synthetic images in films, and now, computer games.