Electro-Optics reaps high sales, reputation as a premier supplier

By Tom Henderson / Special to The Detroit News
Detroit News: Sunday, August 22, 2004

TRAVERSE CITY — A tiny company founded in Silicon Valley that now has its headquarters in the scenic Leelanau Peninsula in northwestern Michigan is a critical member of a supply team building the world’s largest laser system.

Traverse City-based Electro-Optics Technologies Inc., makes components for high-end lasers, and is particularly known in scientific circles for a device called a Faraday isolator.

The components are used by the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons design laboratory that also researches ways to improve national security. Don Jedlovic is a lead engineer with Livermore’s National Ignition Facility project, which, when completed in 2008, is designed to use 192 laser beams to amplify a beginning laser pulse — called a seed pulse — by 10 trillion times.

The 192 lasers will generate 500 trillion watts at peak power — about 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States — in brief bursts lasting just a few billionths of a second.

All that power will be harnessed to, among other things, compress and heat BB-sized capsules of fuel to thermonuclear ignition, allowing scientists
to answer questions about the nuclear-weapons without having to resort to atmospheric testing. Scientists also hope to pursue areas of basic research, such as ways to create and harness fusion energy.

“Faraday rotators allow us to protect the system from dangerous back-reflections of high energy light,” Jedlovic said. “They function as one way optical valves which allow light to propagate in only one direction.”

The isolators — cylinders about two inches high and an inch wide — do that by rotating the polarization of the laser beam, using large magnetic fields generated by permanent magnets.

Jedlovic says Electro-Optic’s isolators are used throughout the National Ignition facility. The seven-acre building complex in Livermore, Calif., was completed in 2001, with construction continuing on its laser components.

Electro-Optics was founded in Freemont, Calif., in 1987 by West Bloomfield Township native and Albion College graduate David Scerbak, who moved the firm to Traverse City in 1992, wanting to return to northern Michigan, where he spent his summers as a young boy.

“My grandfather died and I came back for the funeral. I decided I wanted to stay here,” says Scerbak, who says he was tired of the traffic congestion and housing costs of Silicon Valley, and of a raid-your-neighbor culture that repeatedly saw him lose top people to other companies.

“Traverse City was the biggest town around where I liked to do a lot of outdoor things,” he says. “I blindly leaped into it and was immediately surprised by the caliber of people available to work for us. People love the area and will do anything to get a job here.”

In addition to supplying national laboratories, EOT sells isolators and other laser components to private industry and research universities around the world.

Coherent Inc., the largest maker of lasers in the world, has been buying Electro-Optic components for more than 10 years.

“We use their Faraday isolators to prevent optical feedback into our laser systems, to stop it from disrupting operations or, in the extreme, to cause the laser to self-destruct,” says Jeremy Weston, a vice president in charge of the scientific business unit.

“Without their isolator, it would be a lot more difficult to design and build lasers. It’s a critical component. There are similar products out there, but no one else has their performance.”

Tom Henderson is a Metro Detroit free-lance writer.