PC-Based systems for experiments in optical characterization of materials

An automatic control for applications of optical characterization of materials using the optical Z-Scan technique is presented in this work. The emphasis is placed in the design of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the automation process. For this purpose, we use a USB data acquisition module with programmable I/O ports for control and signals acquisition for the complete system. The control software was developed using the graphical programming language LabVIEW (registered) and compiled in order to obtain a portable system with the hardware used in this work.