BOSS visits Gooch & Housego, Torquay




Bristol Optical Students Society makes first industry visit to Gooch & Housego, Torquay.


On Tuesday 29th November, Bristol Optical Student’s Society, a.k.a BOSS, held its first ever industry excursion, bussing a mix of 11 students and post-docs down to Gooch & Housego’s Torquay site. Leading the world in high-quality optics manufacturing, the UK-based G&H has supplied the technology that underpins the foundations of our modern networked world. Having recently expanded their Torquay facility as well as being awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise for their highly successful Fiber-Q device, BOSS was keen to head down to the Devonshire coast to find out the secret to their success.

The visit started with an overview of the historical and current state of the company, before a tour of the company’s manufacturing facilities. From the hand-fabrication of precision fused-fibre waveguides, to the assembly of bespoke optics modules, the tour visited each stage of the company’s manufacturing process, exhibiting the large variety of optical systems they produce. After lunch was generously provided, the day was concluded with an informal networking session with members of G&H’s staff and management. Discussing everything from business strategies to commercial quantum computation, this session allowed the visitors to discuss their personal interests in the industry, as well as giving G&H an opportunity to ask quantum engineering researchers about current research and the future of their field.

Bristol Optical Students Society would like to thank all of Gooch & Housego Torquay for a great day, especially Tom Legg for helping organise the visit. If you are interested in joining BOSS and finding out about the many academic, professional and extracurricular opportunities available (for free) to BOSS members, please email BOSS.Bristol.OSA@gmail.com or like our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/lightisboss/.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Science for a Successful Nation 2018

Image
The outreach team were once again invited out of the lab and on an early morning training to London to present the latest and greatest in quantum engineering. After an early morning start, and accidental seat reservation in the quiet carriage, we arrived at the Royal Society to take part EPSRC's Science for a Successful Nation 2018. The event aims to showcase EPSRC's investments and demonstrate their social, cultural and economic impacts. Bristol University was well represented with stands from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and the Jean Golding Institute. In amongst the exhibits were students from the Quantum Engineering CDT and QETLabs demonstrating the importance of data encryption in a connected society. By showing how readily data can be intercepted on network, it is easily seen that we need to invest in data security to ensure it's remains secure in the near future. The event was well attended by EPSRC representatives and industrial partners.
Read more

BQIT:18 - Day Three

Image
TU Delft and KTH's Val Zwiller opens day three of BQIT Bristol awoke in a thick fog on Friday morning, but by the time the first session was in full swing, we were back under the glorious BQIT sunshine, looking down on the harbourside from our venue, MShed. Kicking off the day was Val Zwiller of TU Delft & KTH Stockholm, giving a history and outlook for superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDS), with an emphasis on the importance of time resolution - photon purity will appear much reduced if measured without appropriate time resolution! QET Labs' Dondu Sahin followed up with Bristol's plans for near unity efficiency, ring-coupled SNSPDs, which have the added bonus of precise wavelength tunability, and Anthony Laing (also from QET Labs), with his talk on photonic simulations of molecular quantum dynamics. In the next session, "Quantum Communications and Networks", Xiao Yuan presented University of Oxford's latest quantum algorithm
Read more

Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition

Image
Researchers from CQP and QE-CDT manning the stand for the first half of the week The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is one of the largest events in the outreach calendar and is attended by thousands. Scientists from all over the UK are invited to display their cutting-edge research during the week-long event. After a competitive application process, the Centre for Quantum Photonics was invited to explain the weird and wonderful world of quantum computing, as one of only 22 exhibits. Team from the second half of the week enjoying the soirée Our exhibit took the public on journey to discover how we control light, why we want to use it to create more powerful computers and how the strange world of quantum mechanics will get us there. The first part of the display illustrated how our technology relies on the same physical processes as superfast broadband, confining light using total internal reflection. A simulation of the "quantum Christmas tree" produced
Read more