Lab Resources

Open-source resources for building and running an optics / quantum lab. New researchers can lean on a wealth of free guides, tutorials, software, and hardware designs to get a setup aligned, locked, and automated. Everything below is grouped by what you'd actually want to do: pick up lab skills, build open hardware, control your experiment in code, or plug into the wider community.

Practical guides & lab skills

Pedagogical starting points for working in an optics lab — how to align and characterize beams, use the standard detectors and electronics, and lock a laser for the first time. Beyersdorf's free e-book is a great place to begin.

Video lecture courses

Vendor tutorials

  • Thorlabs Photonics Lab How-To Videos — Practical topics like aligning a laser beam parallel to the table, aligning optical isolators, fiber coupling, polarizer orientation, and using waveplates.
  • Newport Tutorials — Fundamentals including fiber-optic basics, polarizers & waveplates, vibration isolation, opto-mechanical design, and positioning equipment.
  • Edmund Optics Knowledge Center — Tutorials and application notes across imaging, laser optics, microscopy, optomechanics, and testing & detection (including mirror configurations and beam-alignment best practices).

Laser locking & control

Reference books

  • Building Electro-Optical Systems: Making It All Work — P. Hobbs. A pragmatic guide full of real-world insight.
  • Building Scientific Apparatus — Moore, Davis & Coplan. Covers the optical, mechanical, and electronic design of lab instruments.
  • Optical Measurements for Scientists and Engineers: A Practical Guide — Arthur McClelland & Max Mankin. A compact crash-course for newcomers to optics labs: common measurement techniques (spectroscopy, microscopy), typical components, and how to build and collect data from simple setups — filled with hands-on tips for aligning, characterizing, and troubleshooting optical experiments.
  • Lasers — A. E. Siegman. The definitive graduate reference on laser physics — optical resonators, Gaussian beams, and laser dynamics.
  • Fundamentals of Photonics — B. E. A. Saleh & M. C. Teich. A broad, well-illustrated standard text covering optics, beams, fibers, and laser physics from the ground up.

Open hardware & DIY equipment

Open-source instrumentation and control electronics you can build yourself — from 3D-printable mechanics to FPGA-based digital laser locks, often at a fraction of commercial cost.

Major initiatives

  • OpenLabTools (University of Cambridge) — Low-cost, open-access scientific instrumentation: modular designs and tutorials for data-acquisition systems, sensors, actuators, and 3D-printed mechanics, including an open-source automated microscope and mechanical tester.
  • Open-Labware.net (Baden Lab & TReND in Africa) — Designs for 3D-printable lab instruments including FlyPi (open fluorescence microscope), OpenSpritzer (microfluidic injector), Spikeling (neuron simulator), and low-cost micromanipulators.
  • RepRap Open-Source Lab Wiki — An aggregator for open scientific hardware, linking Cambridge’s OpenLabTools, Berkeley’s Tekla Labs, Open-Neuroscience, and many specific device projects.

Open electronics & control hardware

  • Implementing PDH Locking with Red Pitaya — A full digital Pound–Drever–Hall laser lock using a Red Pitaya STEMlab 125-14.
  • Linien — User-friendly laser locking on the RedPitaya (STEMlab 125-14) that just works. Built with Python and Migen and based on red_pid; developed for spectroscopy signals but also supports PDH, other lock-in techniques, and simple PID.
  • RedPitaya Lockbox (TU Darmstadt APQ) — A digital controller for laser frequency stabilization on the RedPitaya STEMlab 125-14, with schematics and PCB layouts for an analog interface suitable for 19-inch rack units. Pairs with the lockbox feature of PyRPL.
  • PDH photodiode (TU Darmstadt APQ) — A wideband photodetector (Hamamatsu S9055-01 Si-PIN photodiode + transimpedance amplifier) with an AC-coupled non-inverting stage designed for Pound–Drever–Hall laser locking.
  • PyRPL — Turns a Red Pitaya (STEMlab 125-14) into a versatile lock-in amplifier, PID controller, and network/spectrum analyzer for laser locking, with both a GUI and a full Python scripting API (source).

Experiment control & automation

The software stack for running an experiment in code: high-level control frameworks, the libraries that talk to your instruments, distributed lab-management tools, and machine-learning optimizers that tune the setup for you.

Experiment control frameworks

  • labscript suite — A powerful experiment-automation framework widely used in AMO and quantum labs. Flexible composition, control, execution, and analysis with an emphasis on precise hardware timing; heterogeneous hardware support, a Python scripting interface, remote/distributed control, and ML-based optimization.
  • ARTIQ (Advanced Real-Time Infrastructure for Quantum Physics) — M-Labs’ control and data-acquisition system (with the NIST Ion Storage Group). FPGA-based Sinara hardware delivers sub-microsecond latency and nanosecond timing; experiments are written in Python and compiled for deterministic timing.
  • QCoDeS — A Python data-acquisition framework from the Copenhagen/Microsoft quantum labs: unified instrument communication, measurement automation, and data storage with a broad driver library.
  • PyMeasure — A lighter-weight Python framework for scientific measurements — instrument classes plus a simple system for running experiment procedures, an open-source replacement for many LabVIEW-style tasks.

Instrument communication libraries

  • PyVISA — The go-to library for controlling instruments over GPIB, USB, and serial (a Python wrapper for the VISA protocol).
  • PySerial — A simple library for serial / USB communication.
  • Awesome Photonics — A curated list of open-source photonics projects, including communication libraries.

Distributed control & lab management

  • LabRAD — Laboratory Remote Automation and Distribution (NIST/JQI): a networked server-client architecture for scalable, multi-PC control systems.
  • Entropy (Quantum Machines) — Free, open-source web-based lab-management software for complex experimental workflows, calibrations, data logging, and electronic lab notebooks.

Automation & optimization

Control theory background

  • Steve Brunton — Control Bootcamp — A concise YouTube course on classical and modern control (PID, state space, LQR, Kalman filtering) — the theory you need to design a stable feedback loop.
  • Brian Douglas — Classical Control Theory — Intuitive, animated explanations of Bode plots, loop shaping, and stability margins for building real engineering intuition when tuning servo loops.

Communities & vendor SDKs

Where to find working control systems from other groups, ask for help when alignment goes sideways, and grab the official SDKs that ship with commercial hardware.

Trapped-ion control systems

Forums & Q&A

Vendor SDKs & APIs

  • Thorlabs Kinesis — Comprehensive motion-control software with .NET controls for building custom apps in C#, Visual Basic, LabVIEW, or any .NET language. USB plug-and-play for multi-unit / multi-axis setups, reusable .NET controls with full graphical instrument panels (e.g., KDC101) plus programmatic access, and C# / LabVIEW example projects.
  • Thorlabs APT Suite — The APT family of controllers (stepper/DC motor, open- and closed-loop piezo, strain-gauge readers, solenoid drivers, NanoTrak feedback) with unified PC-based user and programming APIs. LabVIEW talks to APT controllers via ActiveX, with example VIs and a usage guide.
  • thorlabs_apt — A Python package for Thorlabs APT hardware.
  • PyDAQmx — An open-source alternative to LabVIEW for National Instruments DAQ devices.