Whois & Analysis for thorlabs.com

Thorlabs, Inc. is a privately held optical equipment company headquartered in Newton, New Jersey.

The company was founded by Alex Cable, who serves as its current president and CEO.

As of 2013, Thorlabs employed about 1,000 people directly or indirectly and has sales of approximately $200 million.

The company has offices in multiple American States, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

It sells approximately 20,000 different products.

An optical fiber or optical fibre is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair.

Optical fibers are used most often as a means to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber and find wide usage in fiber-optic communications, where they permit transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than wire cables.

Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with lesser amounts of loss; in addition, fibers are also immune to electromagnetic interference, a problem from which metal wires suffer excessively.

Fibers are also used for illumination, and are wrapped in bundles so that they may be used to carry images, thus allowing viewing in confined spaces, as in the case of a fiberscope.

Specially designed fibers are also used for a variety of other applications, some of them being fiber optic sensors and fiber lasers.

Optoelectronics is the study and application of electronic devices and systems that source, detect and control light, usually considered a sub-field of photonics.

In this context, light often includes invisible forms of radiation such as gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet and infrared, in addition to visible light.

Optoelectronic devices are electrical-to-optical or optical-to-electrical transducers, or instruments that use such devices in their operation.

A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation.

The term "laser" originated as an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation".

The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore H.

Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, based on theoretical work by Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow.

A laser differs from other sources of light in that it emits light coherently.

Spatial coherence allows a laser to be focused to a tight spot, enabling applications such as laser cutting and lithography.

Spatial coherence also allows a laser beam to stay narrow over great distances (collimation), enabling applications such as laser pointers.

Lasers can also have high temporal coherence, which allows them to emit light with a very narrow spectrum, i.e., they can emit a single color of light.

Temporal coherence can be used to produce pulses of light as short as a femtosecond.

Polarization (also polarisation) is a parameter applying to transverse waves that specifies the geometrical orientation of the oscillations.

In a transverse wave the direction of the oscillation is transverse to the direction of motion of the wave, so the oscillations can have different directions perpendicular to the wave direction.

A simple example of a polarized transverse wave is vibrations traveling along a taut string (see image) for example in a musical instrument like a guitar string.

Depending on how the string is plucked, the vibrations can be in a vertical direction, horizontal direction, or at any angle perpendicular to the string.

In contrast, in longitudinal waves, such as sound waves in a liquid or gas, the displacement of the particles in the oscillation is always in the direction of propagation, so these waves don't exhibit polarization.

Transverse waves that exhibit polarization include electromagnetic waves such as light and radio waves, gravitational waves, and transverse sound waves (shear waves) in solids.

In some types of transverse waves the wave displacement is limited to a single direction, so these also don't exhibit polarization.

For example, in surface waves in liquids (gravity waves) the wave displacement of the particles is always in a vertical plane.