Electromagnetic radiation is energy travelling as waves or photons. This is not the place or the time to go into this discussion [1] but Einstein and Infeld said it well:

Light, or the visible light spectrum range from \( \in [400 - 700] \) nm in the electromagnetic radiation spectrum. XX insert picture of Elmag spectrum here XX. Above, with higher wavelengths, you will find infrared radiation (also known as IR), and under you will find the ultraviolet radiation (also known as UV). We call it visible light due to the fact that our eyes can only "pick up" these wavelengths. For this project we will mostly focus on light \( \lambda \in [470,520] \) nm region.

You have probably heard that nothing can travel faster than light? But not that many (non-physicist) remembers what velocity light actually travels with. In most cases it's enough to say that light travels in \( \sim 3.0 \cdot 10^{8}\) m/s in vacuum or \( \sim 6.7 {\cdot 10^{8}} \)mph.

When talking about light there is a couple of expressions that is good to know the meaning of

• Monochromatic
• Coherent
• Wavelength
• Optical Path

The given wavelength \(\lambda \) for a lightsource can be found using the following formula:

\begin{align} \lambda = d sin(\theta) \end{align}

Where \(d\) is the grid spacing and \(\theta\) is the angle.

Continuing this part we will refer to light as waves. As shown in the picture above, visible light ranges around ∈[400−700] nm. This is known as the wavelength of the light, and to label it we use the symbol \(\lambda\). To better understand the physics we will start by using the rainbow as an example. Most people have had the pleasure to see this magnificent phenomenon in their life. To understand what happens to the light, we need to introduce the term refraction index. In short terms, this means that light will behave differently in different mediums if hit with an angle different than zero from the optical path. For air, the refraction index is simply \(1\), but for water it is \(1.33\), both in vacuum. Using Snell’s law and the fact that the light travels from air to water we can see that the angle with which the light will be emitted can be found by:

\begin{align} n_1 sin\theta_1 = n_2 sin\theta_2 \end{align}

The light from a light-emitting diode, LED for short, can be viewed by the human eye as monochromatic. This means it appears to only light up as one color. From theory we know that a LED cannot be monochromatic, thus proving one of the biggest differences between a LED and a laser. More importantly, the light from a LED is not coherent, meaning that the light waves do not have the same frequency. A LED loses little energy to heat as it applies most of its energy to light up the diode. This is a very useful property.

To create a simple LED-circuit you only need a couple of components: a LED, a resistance, some wires, a circuit board and a voltage source. We used a blue LED lamp with the properties 20mA and 3.2V, a resistance of 1kΩ and a PHYWE power supply that allowed us to vary our voltage between 0-30V. The LED and the resistance were mounted to the circuit board using a soldering iron, before the wires were soldered to each side of the board (insert figure).

As observed in figure (?), our setup is made up of the following components: LED-circuit, lenses, filters, mirrors, spectrometre and CCD-camera.

The purpose of the lenses is to focuse the light into a thin beam. Not only will this make the LED-light more similar to a laser, but it will make sure we have a higher intensity concentrated on a smaller radius.

In order to make the LED more similar to a laser (monochromatic) we need to filter out quite a bit of its specter. Like mentioned before, LED is not monochromatic, so we will use a blue filter in order to remove all the wavelength we do not wish to use for the GFP or yeast. It is worth mentioning that even though we use filters and lenses to focuse the light, we still have to keep the LED at a maximum of 20V and hopefully the intensity is high enough for lasing to happen.

Ideally, the mirrors we use should be 98% reflective and the last 2% would be emitted light that we could detect. Unfortunately, we have not been able to acquire mirrors of that sort, which is why our setup looks a bit different from that of a regular laser. The mirrors we used had a ??????.

The solution (both GFP or yeast) will go between the mirrors, in order to increase the effect of the light emitted from the solution. In order to gather the light emitted from the GFP, which will be emitted in all directions, we place a big lense next to it which will focus the green light right into a filter that picks out the wavelengths we want to see.