Skip to content

The Institute of Optics / Optical Engineering (OPT/OPE)

The Institute of Optics provides a two-semester sequence for students pursing either a degree in Optics or Optical Engineering. During the Fall semester students learn the processes to undertake both a research project or a product development project. They also review system design material relevant to either a basic science project or a technology development project. Potential customers and thesis advisors present potential projects to the students. Students then make a choice whether they will complete the Optics major by individually developing a senior thesis or complete an Optical Engineering major by working on project team. Optical Engineering students rank their choices of the available projects. Students interested in completed the Optics degree select a thesis advisor.

During the Spring semester the Optics students complete their thesis research under the supervision of their advisor while periodically updating the course instructor on their progress. The Optical Engineering teams meet with their customers, course instructor and faculty advisors throughout the semester as they complete product requirement and design documents perform design reviews and complete they projects. As required by their project and approach, they do detailed design, perform prototype tests, write code and refine their design with the goal of providing a detailed report and prototype (if required) to the customer at the end of the semester. Optical Engineering students typically are required to participate in Design Day. Participation of Optics students is highly encouraged.

Contact Information

Professor Wayne Knox
wknox@UR.Rochester.edu
585-273-5520

Optical Engineering Senior Design

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:31 am

CUBESAT

Team Members Customer Daniel Brooks – Optimax Systems, Inc. Mentor Dr. Aaron Bauer – Institute of Optics Abstract The goal of this design project was to build an alignment tool…

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:31 am

Plano Cylinder Lens Metrology System

CYL Team Customer Points of Contact: Chris Toomey, Clayton Summers, Dan Denison, and Scott Rudder Faculty Advisors Abstract There is a growing demand for non-spherical optics in industry. The manufacturing…

topics: Optics,
Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:31 am

DIGITEYEZ

Team Members Mentors and Faculty Advisors Abstract The CLEAR Digiteyez Optimization project is an exploratory Senior Design project to implement and improve various optimization routines already existing in the CLEAR…

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:30 am

Advanced Growing Resources

This group is designing a broadband anti-reflection coating and an imaging multivariate optical element coating to eliminate the need for software-based image analysis for AGR’s handheld camera system.

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:30 am

ASML Metawave: Wavefront Control via Tunable Metasurface

Team Members Customer Ali Basiri & Luke Potter Faculty Advisor Michele Cotrufo Abstract The envisioned product is a cutting-edge optical correction system leveraging actively tunable metasurfaces. Designed specifically for the…

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:30 am

Microscope Objective for Lithography Wafer Alignment

Team Members Customer Kirill Sobolev, ASML 1 Abstract The purpose of our project is to design an objective lens for the ORION wafer alignment system in ASML’s next-generation lithography machines.…

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 3, 2024 | 09:30 am

ASML NANO: Sub-nm Vibration Sensor

Abstract The aim of this project is to explore designs for a vibrometer for semiconductor wafer measuring machines. These wafers power all of our modern computers and cellphones, and are…

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 2, 2024 | 04:30 pm

EDMUND-3DP

The 3D printing project aims to design, create, and test a polymer printed part that houses a f/5.6, eight element system. After the system was completed, repeatability measurements were done along with testing our procedure on the similar f/8 system.

Optical Engineering Senior Design
May 2, 2024 | 11:13 am

IRL Glasses – Take a Break

Abstract On average, Americans spend 11 hours a day looking at a screen and touch their phones over 2,000 times a day. The goal for the IRL Glasses for this…

Optics Senior Thesis

The goal of this thesis is to design and build a tunable flying focus experimental setup using adaptive optics. The flying focus technique produces an extended intensity peak which moves at a designed focal velocity independent of the medium group velocity. This requires an optical system that can extend the focal region beyond the Rayleigh length as well as impart sufficient radial group delay to achieve spatiotemporal control. An axiparabola is used to extend the focal region and a deformable mirror imparts a user defined radial group delay to achieve spatiotemporal control. The tunability of this technique will be used to optimize secondary source generation experiments such as laser wakefield acceleration and terahertz generation.

Archive

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

CubeSat

Team Customer Dr. Daniel Brooks – Optimax Systems Inc. Mentor Dr. Aaron Bauer – Institute of Optics Abstract The goal of this design project was to demonstrate the capabilities of…

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

IRL

Team Mentor Prof. Jennifer Kruschwitz Background IRL Glasses is a product with the goal of minimizing the amount of technology people have to interact  with on a daily basis. The first…

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

META360 – Hybrid Refractive-Metalens Design

The META360 project seeks to enhance the current Circle Optics 360º field-of-view stitch-free camera system using novel meta-optics technology. Using Synopsys’ new MetaOptic Designer software, we explore the use of meta-optics in a hybrid lens design.

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

RMSC

Team Mentor Professor Greg Schmidt Abstract Our Group’s Senior Design Team was tasked with designing a museum exhibit for RMSC that offered a fun experience for participants of all ages…

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

SPLAY

Optical Design of a Compact Projector Lens for a Portable Display Project Vision The desired product is a portable display consisting of a collapsible screen and a compact projector with…

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

Myopia Control with Optical Design

This senior design-driven project creates accurate Zemax ray-tracing models of the human eye to evaluate diffractive-refractive hybrid contact lenses for correcting wavefront error and chromatic aberration. The eventual goal is to apply the technology to school-aged children to prevent the progression of myopia development.

topics: Axial Color, Chromatic Aberration, Contact Lenses, Diffractive Surfaces, Eye Modeling, Human Eye, Hyperopia, Lateral Color, Myopia, Optical Design, Optical Modeling, Optics, Ray Tracing, Vision, Vision Improvement, Zemax, Zernike Polynomials,
OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

AGR – A Hyperspectral System with Spatial Resolution

Team Mentor Professor Greg Schmidt Abstract Advanced Growing Resources (AGR), is pioneering targeting systems that send mass pesticide blanketing towards obsolescence. The targeting system that was designed during this project…

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

iTEST

Team Mentor Brandon Zimmerman Abstract The Clear Eye Exam allows for users to take an eye exam from their home and obtain an eye prescription. This lets people have an…

OPT OPE Archive
April 28, 2023 | 05:34 am

ASML Broadband Single-mode Fiber Coupler

DCORE4 Team Mentors Govind P. Agrawal, Julie Bentley, Jacob Roccabruno Abstract The optical senior design class at the University of Rochester strives to tackle engineering problems through engineering processes and…

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

Two-Color Nonlocal Aberration Cancellation

Two-Color Nonlocal Aberration Cancellation is one of the many exciting applications of quantum entanglement. In this experiment we create position-momentum entangled photons via SPDC.

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

RMSC

We designed an interactive and educational imaging system. The guest will be able to project an image onto a screen.

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

NANOAR

Have you heard of an AR coating without actually coating any materials while working for a wide bandwidth from UV to IR? That is the nanostructure coating.

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

iMG

Our goal is to use existing tools and our optical knowledge to build a simulation tool that carries out a rigorous optical analysis and simulates the imaging of a satellite at a range of distances, attitudes, and illumination angles.

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

FIBER

The simulation will model the output characteristics as light travels through the fiber, giving a rare look at a otherwise inaccessible areas of the fiber.

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

CubeSat

We designed an optical system for a NASA ROSES proposal. The system would be housed within a CubeSat and study Zodiacal light.

OPT OPE Archive
March 1, 2022 | 10:56 am

Yanik Thesis

Probability distributions of work and entropy of a qubit engine powered by simultaneous weak quantum measurements.

OPT OPE Archive
February 28, 2022 | 06:26 pm

iTEST

Team Rachel Chan Zihao Li Sinabu Pumulo Mentor Brandon Zimmerman Abstract The Clear Eye Test is a virtual eye prescription platform that measures refractive error of the eye with a…

OPT OPE Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:36 pm

WOBBLY

Exploring mechanical solutions to reduce the effects of turbulence on the Zygo Verifire™ interferometer

Energy and Environmental Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:36 pm

Team Thermo

The solar steam turbine is a design that uses a femtosecond laser-processed superwicking metal sheet to generate electricity via steam generation. Team Thermo wishes to thank the following for their…

Community Engagement Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:36 pm

SUITCASE

The Virtual Optics Suitcase makes engaging optics demonstrations accessible, encouraging careers in STEM.

OPT OPE Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:35 pm

SKY

An indoor lighting system designed to simulate the sun.

Medical Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:35 pm

OTICS

The Hybrid Endoscope/Microscope project is a senior design project that aims to design and build a system that combines the endoscope’s view and the microscope’s view during ENT surgery.

Machine Learning Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:34 pm

EYEZ

Development of a telehealth platform that provides digital optical prescriptions, making high quality vision accessible to everyone.

Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:34 pm

CIRCLE

A 360° tessellated, parallax-reduced, cinema camera system.

Material Science Archive
March 18, 2021 | 01:33 pm

AR

The Nanostructure AR coating project aims to Investigate and model nanostructure AR coatings on OptiLayer and OptiRE software.

Hyperion is a 3D visualization platform for optical design. It provides a fully immersive, and interactive 3D user experience. It enables the visualization of models of folded freeform optical systems. The frontend user experience is supported by the computational ray-tracing engine of Eikonal+, an optical design research software. We have built a cross-platform light-weight version of Eikonal+ that can communicate with any user interface. We have also demonstrated a prototype of the 3D user experience using a Hololens AR display.