In my first year of grad school, I was visiting a colleague’s lab and was asked if I wanted to test some of their new diffractive optics. I said sure and started toying with the big lens on the table, no gloves, no precautions other than trying not to drop/smudge it. After about 5 minutes of geeking out over the fact that a perfectly flat, transparent lens was focusing the light, I asked how much it would cost to get one sent to my lab for an experiment I was working on. He said that it was the only one of its kind in existence, but the manufacturing r&d cost for it was over $50K alone. My heart nearly fell outta my chest.
Yup, though the $50K was specifically the R&D cost to develop a technique for making the lens. It used a nano-scale pattern on glass to focus light via diffraction, as opposed to standard refractive lenses or mirrors. The ultimate goal was to develop a process for manufacturing these lenses en masse, for deployment in a large particle detector where traditional lenses wouldn’t work. They succeeded, and nowadays (6 years later), they can basically print the pattern using the same techniques as in microchip manufacturing. Back then, though, there was just then one prototype that represented that $50K of research, so I am really glad I didn’t fuck it up haha
In my first year of grad school, I was visiting a colleague’s lab and was asked if I wanted to test some of their new diffractive optics. I said sure and started toying with the big lens on the table, no gloves, no precautions other than trying not to drop/smudge it. After about 5 minutes of geeking out over the fact that a perfectly flat, transparent lens was focusing the light, I asked how much it would cost to get one sent to my lab for an experiment I was working on. He said that it was the only one of its kind in existence, but the manufacturing r&d cost for it was over $50K alone. My heart nearly fell outta my chest.
wait, $50k for a lens?
Yup, though the $50K was specifically the R&D cost to develop a technique for making the lens. It used a nano-scale pattern on glass to focus light via diffraction, as opposed to standard refractive lenses or mirrors. The ultimate goal was to develop a process for manufacturing these lenses en masse, for deployment in a large particle detector where traditional lenses wouldn’t work. They succeeded, and nowadays (6 years later), they can basically print the pattern using the same techniques as in microchip manufacturing. Back then, though, there was just then one prototype that represented that $50K of research, so I am really glad I didn’t fuck it up haha
woah :0