Teaching practicums

A practicum is the part of study where physics is done by hand: assemble a setup, align an optical system, measure, understand why the result differs from what you expected, and measure again. Practicums run alongside lecture courses from the first year, and from the second year students also work on the department’s research instruments.

Optics and laser physicsThe department’s core practicums. Renewed in 2025 – over a hundred lyceum students saw the new setups during the April tours.

Special practicum on research instrumentsA scanning electron microscope, a Raman spectrometer, an atomic force microscope, an ellipsometer – the same instruments on which dissertations are done, at the shared-access centre.

Digital electronics and microcontrollersA practicum on modern equipment, part of which the department received with the support of Melexis.

Remote labs with ChemnitzTen remote laboratory sessions based at Chemnitz University of Technology with DAAD support – and two certificate programmes in English, 10 ECTS credits each.

Special practicum in laser physicsA whole laboratory where you learn about different types of lasers and how to work with them.

Special practicums with Thorlabs kitsDedicated Thorlabs kits for studying polarisation phenomena, Fourier optics and modern optical microscopy techniques.

The “Spectroscopic Measurements” teaching and research laboratory

All twelve core practicums live in the department’s teaching and research laboratory – the first place you come to and where you spend the most hours. Twelve practicums are set up here, taking you step by step from “how to switch on a laser” to “how to design a measurement yourself and prove the result is right”. Each practicum has its own setup, its own sample and its own protocol, which you defend.

Laser physics – you fire up a laser, find the lasing threshold, measure the power, divergence and beam structure.
Colorimetry – you turn colour into numbers: compute colour coordinates and check how accurately a screen or a paint reproduces a given shade.
Polarisation methods of optical measurement – you detect hidden stresses in glass, film thickness and the optical activity of a solution from the rotation of the polarisation plane.
Nonlinear optics – an invisible infrared beam enters the crystal, a green one leaves: you observe and measure the doubling of light’s frequency yourself.
Techniques and methods of spectral measurement – you assemble and calibrate the source–monochromator–detector chain yourself and find out what really limits the resolution.
Coherent phenomena – you work with interferometers, holograms and speckles, measuring displacements smaller than a wavelength.
Optoelectronic devices and systems – you take the characteristics of photodiodes, LEDs and laser diodes and build the simplest optical data link from them.
Digital electronics and microcontroller technology – you solder a circuit and write firmware so the setup runs the experiment and logs the data itself.
Semiconductor optics – from the absorption edge and the photoluminescence spectrum you determine the band gap – the parameter that sets an LED’s colour and a solar panel’s efficiency.
Modern microscopy – you go from the classic light microscope to confocal and fluorescence ones and run into the resolution limit in practice.
Optical metrology – you learn not just to measure but to prove accuracy: working with standards, computing errors and building an uncertainty budget.
Optical materials science – you study samples’ transparency, refractive index, coatings and defects and conclude which device the material is fit for.

See where all of this happens: Laboratories and the virtual tour. The practicum syllabi are in the Documentation section.