Dark Side of the Lab

Year: 
2019
Ranking: 
Entrant
Artist: 
Peter Krogen (Post-Doc)
Department: 
Physics

Description

Rainbows form when sunlight is refracted by raindrops, their distinctive colors created as white light is dispersed into a continuous spectrum. This rainbow is created by dispersing a supercontinuum laser with a prism and scattering it across a flowing fog to create a mesmerizing sheet of light.

A q-switched neodymium laser produces intense nanosecond pulses of light in the near-infrared which are coupled into a microstructured optical fiber. A careful balance of dispersion and optical nonlinearities in the fiber cause a broadening of the pulses, creating a supercontinuum spanning from ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths while preserving the coherence of the original pulsed laser. These pulses are refracted through a prism to create a rainbow, which is made visible with a turbulent glycol fog. Scattered light from the rainbow is discretized from a continuous spectrum into the 7 colors visible in the image by the camera. No additional post processing was carried out on the image other than white balance correction and pixel noise reduction carried out in the camera.

CSEPSchuller LabCNSIUCSBMOXI