How active is the field of Optics in physics and industry?

[henry wang]

I am a second year Physics student, and I have a summer research opportunity on Optics (for which the topic is uncertain). The topic will probably be related to Imaging in biological systems, Analogue computation using light and, Light scattering in correlated systems, as they are the topic of interest of the supervisor.
I want to work in industry after graduation, and I would like to know a) answer for the title, b)would it be useful for applying to industry?
I apologize for the vague word "industry", but I really don't know much about it.
Thank you very much for your time.

 

[Wminus]

Very active.
1) Knowing what's under the skin of a person is critical in biomedical engineering, and guess how you find out? Using light/EM radiation => optics.
2) Optoelectronics & Lasers - critical to modern industry.
3) Electromagnetic radiation is used to gather information in astronomy and space industry (telescopes) => optics is important.
4) Materials science: Optics is used to measure deformation/stress of materials. As you can imagine, this is very important in all kinds of fields.
5) Spectroscopy: Critical in chemistry
6) interferometry: important for metrology
7) ALL manners of EM sensors used everywhere from cars to fusion plants.
8) Fibre optical industry.

And photography, and displays, and optical information storage/readout (ie DVDs and more), and so on and so forth, it's impossible to list them all.

To summarise: If you specialise in Optics, Photonics and EM, I really don't think you'll have problems finding a job.

 

[Logical Dog]

Very active.
1) Knowing what's under the skin of a person is critical in biomedical engineering, and guess how you find out? Using light/EM radiation => optics.
2) Optoelectronics & Lasers - critical to modern industry.
3) Electromagnetic radiation is used to gather information in astronomy and space industry (telescopes) => optics is important.
4) Materials science: Optics is used to measure deformation/stress of materials. As you can imagine, this is very important in all kinds of fields.
5) Spectroscopy: Critical in chemistry
6) interferometry: important for metrology
7) ALL manners of EM sensors used everywhere from cars to fusion plants.
8) Fibre optical industry.

And photography, and displays, and optical information storage/readout (ie DVDs and more), and so on and so forth, it's impossible to list them all.

To summarise: If you specialise in Optics, Photonics and EM, I really don't think you'll have problems finding a job.

Wow

 

[The Bill]

There's also photolithography in the semiconductor industry. Companies like Cymer hire physicists to help design, produce, troubleshoot, etc. their UV light sources which are used by processor and other microchip manufacturers.