A design-to-manufacture company for static, high‑étendue interferometers.
Ollam Photonics was founded to take one instrument family – the static Fourier transform interferometer – from requirement to manufactured article.
Ollam Photonics designs, specifies, and verifies field-widened Fourier transform instruments.
Say what you need to measure. The instrument follows.
That statement — the quantity, the environment, and the constraint that is currently losing — is the whole of what a customer brings. Ollam Photonics turns it into the interferometer the measurement calls for: the requirements derived from the mission rather than assumed, the design optimised for those requirements and for what a vendor can build, and the article verified against them. Four steps, each closing with a named deliverable.
Get in touch- 01
Concept of operations
Deliverable: an agreed statement of the measurement.
- 02
Requirement generation
Deliverable: a requirements set with provenance on every number.
- 03
Inverse design
Deliverable: a design package a vendor can quote.
- 04
Build and verify
Deliverable: the instrument and its test record.
Dr. Miles Egan
Founder and Principal
A decade on the two disciplines the company joins: the design, fabrication, and characterization of spatial heterodyne instruments, and physics-based sensor performance modelling at government scale.
Dr. Egan holds a Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2020), where his instrument series produced time-resolved standoff Raman spectra through a spatial heterodyne spectrometer with no entrance slit. He was a member of the SuperCam instrument team at Los Alamos National Laboratory for NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, co-authored the winning proposal for IARPA's PICARD program and led its optical modelling, and has authored or co-authored more than twenty-five peer-reviewed publications and book chapters, including the Cambridge University Press chapter on Raman theory.
The lineage
The instrument family, from the first grating interferometer to the founder's papers. Highlighted entries are the company's own.
- 1958ConnesSpectromètre interférentiel à sélection par l’amplitude de modulation — the SISAM: the mirrors of a Michelson replaced by two gratings.J. Phys. Radium 19, 215
- 1963Bouchareine & ConnesInterféromètre à champ compensé pour spectroscopie par transformation de Fourier — field widening.J. Phys. Radium 24, 134
- 1966Hilliard & ShepherdWide-angle Michelson interferometer for measuring Doppler line widths.J. Opt. Soc. Am. 56, 362
- 1971Dohi & SuzukiAttainment of high resolution holographic Fourier transform spectroscopy.Appl. Opt. 10, 1137
- 1992Harlander et al.Spatial heterodyne spectroscopy for the exploration of diffuse interstellar emission lines at far-ultraviolet wavelengths — Harlander, Reynolds, and Roesler.Astrophys. J. 396, 730
- 2002NRL — Harlander et al.SHIMMER: a spatial heterodyne spectrometer for remote sensing of Earth’s middle atmosphere — flown on STS-112, October 2002, the first spatial heterodyne spectrometer in space.Appl. Opt. 41, 1343
- 2007NRL — Englert et al.Doppler asymmetric spatial heterodyne spectroscopy (DASH): concept and experimental demonstration — Englert, Babcock, and Harlander. SHIMMER launched on STPSat-1 the same year.Appl. Opt. 46, 7297
- 2010NRL — Englert et al.Initial ground-based thermospheric wind measurements using Doppler asymmetric spatial heterodyne spectroscopy (DASH).Opt. Express 18, 27416
- 2017NRL — Englert et al.Michelson Interferometer for Global High-resolution Thermospheric Imaging (MIGHTI): instrument design and calibration — launched aboard NASA’s ICON in 2019.Space Sci. Rev. 212, 553
- 2017Egan et al.Standoff spatial heterodyne Raman spectrometer for mineralogical analysis — Egan, Angel, and Sharma.J. Raman Spectrosc. 48, 1613
- 2018Egan et al.Optimizing data reduction procedures in spatial heterodyne Raman spectroscopy with applications to planetary surface analogs — Egan, Angel, and Sharma.Appl. Spectrosc. 72, 933
- 2020Egan et al.One-mirror, one-grating spatial heterodyne spectrometer for remote-sensing Raman spectroscopy — Egan, Acosta-Maeda, Angel, and Sharma.J. Raman Spectrosc. 51, 1794
- 2020–21SuperCam teamThe SuperCam instrument suite on the NASA Mars 2020 rover: body unit and combined system tests (Wiens et al., 217, 4) and science objectives and mast-unit description (Maurice et al., 217, 47) — co-author.Space Sci. Rev. 217, 4 and 47
- 2021Egan et al.Suppressing the multiplex disadvantage in photon-noise limited interferometry using cross-dispersed spatial heterodyne spectrometry — Egan, Colón, Angel, and Sharma.Appl. Spectrosc. 75, 208
- 2026Ollam Photonics, LLCFounded to take the static Fourier transform interferometer from requirement to manufactured article.
Inside a state that builds photonics.
Ollam Photonics, LLC operates from Montana, within the state's photonics and quantum cluster.
| Legal name | Ollam Photonics, LLC |
|---|---|
| Location | Montana, United States |
| CAGE | 22XP5 |
| UEI | P6V9MC9WCGV5 |
| NAICS | 541715 · 334511 · 334516 · 541330 · 541360 · 541370 · 541511 · 541620 · 541690 |
| PSC | 6630 · 6650 · AJ11 · AJ12 · AR11 · AR12 · AR13 · AR14 · R408 · R425 · R499 |
| Business size | Small business concern; registered in SAM.gov and the SBA Company Registry |
| Ownership | U.S.-owned and operated |
| Cybersecurity | CMMC Level 1 |
Say what you need to measure.
And we'll provide the interferometer to suit your use-case.