Day 14 -June 29th

By Floris van den Brink

At 7:15, the day started with a kind wake-up call. According to some people a little early, but the breakfast compensated a lot. After this, everybody went fresh and happy to our first company: the National Optics Institute, or Institut Nationale d'Optique (INO) according to the French Canadians...

INO is an organisation with an expertise in optical systems and photonics. The institute mainly cares about the applications, fundamental research is hardly performed. That is why only a few graduate students from universities are employed. At the entrance, everyone has to pick up a card with its name. The people which were really awake, could pick the right one without thinking. Only Bram had to be reminded to his name, he took my card and wore it proudly for the first couple of minutes. The tour started with a presentation, giving an overview of the company with the usual statistics and a couple of projects that INO has carried out for the industry. This was mostly fairly cool stuff. The next part of the trip consisted of visiting three running projects.

The next stop was at the Laval University, to be precise at the Centre d'optique photonique et laser (COPL). Indeed, another optics institute. The programme started with a good lunch. As always, this is a very important part of a tour. Nice sandwiches, tasty cakes and coffee, the vital parts of the meal, they were all present. The actual programme started with talks about the activities: cheap optics for telecom purposes and some integrated optical functions and techniques. After this, we got a tour through the laboratories. These were housed in a special cleanroom building, which was designed to eliminate practically all vibrations, both from inside and from outside. We have already seen many cleanrooms, but the uniqueness from this tour was a trip along the systems above the cleanrooms. We could see the filters and the ventilation system that make the room class 10000.

After the tours, it was time for dinner. Everyone was free to chose a restaurant or fast food selling point to fill the stomach. For most participants is was smart to chose a good filling meal, because the next part of the day was scheduled to be in disco Dagobert. It was a very cool evening and night in a disco with the most extraordinary local Canadians. It is remarkable that the only person which has danced with women, was Mariella...
The disco was good but very noisy. Some of us could hear the beep in the ears the next whole day, reminding us of a cool evening!