By: John Wallace
Thomas Crawford, a physics professor at the University of South Carolina, has sold the start-up company he founded, MagAssemble, which aids in the manufacture of diffractive optical elements (DOEs), to Thorlabs.
Crawford, who arrived at the University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC) in 2005 with extensive research experience in disk drive technology, directed his lab in recent years in developing a novel manufacturing process that uses disk drive technology to assemble magnetic nanoparticles. When it became obvious that industry was interested in using the new technology, MagAssemble was born. Several university physics graduates comprised the startup’s staff, including chief scientist Longfei Ye, who earned his doctorate under Crawford’s direction.
“Traditional electronics fabrication technology is expensive for manufacturing micro- and nano-optics,” Crawford says. “Because the size of photonic devices are tied to the wavelength of light (400-700 nm for visible light), the same scaling rules that have pushed integrated circuits to single nanometer sizes cannot be applied to photonics, which is where MagAssemble’s method for nano-manufacturing comes in.
Read more >> https://www.laserfocusworld.com/optics/article/14038695/university-of-south-carolina-startup-breaks-ground-in-nanooptical-manufacturing
