A fun fact about Cherenkov radiation is that research on making efficient Cherenkov detectors in the 1960s led to the development of optical principles still used to design illumination systems and solar concentrators today.
The late professor Roland Winston worked on this problem and discovered a geometry that could concentrate the light from a diffuse source like Cherenkov radiation to a detector with near-ideal performance ( https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1720428 ). It turns out that efficiently transferring light from diffuse sources has applications far beyond detecting Cherenkov radiation, so Winston founded the field of Nonimaging Optics and spent much of the rest of his carreer on developing the foundations of the field and on bringing together a community of scientists who would work on carrying the field forwards.
I do research in this field myself, and I find the optics and principles behind it endlessly fascinating
I worked for a little bit with a group making optical sieves, this stuff is mindblowing to a non-trained-in-the-art outsider. I can easily see losing a couple of decades in that rabbit hole.
Comments
A fun fact about Cherenkov radiation is that research on making efficient Cherenkov detectors in the 1960s led to the development of optical principles still used to design illumination systems and solar concentrators today.
The late professor Roland Winston worked on this problem and discovered a geometry that could concentrate the light from a diffuse source like Cherenkov radiation to a detector with near-ideal performance ( https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1720428 ). It turns out that efficiently transferring light from diffuse sources has applications far beyond detecting Cherenkov radiation, so Winston founded the field of Nonimaging Optics and spent much of the rest of his carreer on developing the foundations of the field and on bringing together a community of scientists who would work on carrying the field forwards.
I do research in this field myself, and I find the optics and principles behind it endlessly fascinating
I worked for a little bit with a group making optical sieves, this stuff is mindblowing to a non-trained-in-the-art outsider. I can easily see losing a couple of decades in that rabbit hole.