BEAMTEAM
From a published figure to a buildable, verified laser-optics bench — in under three minutes.
BEAMTEAM is a multi-agent system (Google Gemini gemini-4-argon) that designs tabletop optical setups for
atomic/quantum physics labs from a natural-language goal, or reproduces them from a figure in a paper. Every
design is checked by a deterministic physics tracer — the LLMs propose, the physics disposes — then aligned,
rendered, and exported as a build kit (bill of materials, printable keyed baseplate, assembly PDF).
Built in one day at a hackathon (2026-10-25). See Provenance.
Project page · Paper (PDF) · 60 s demo video
Gallery
The app
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| Verified layout — Gaussian beams, polarization and power on a plan-view schematic; the verify report reads like an instrument self-test. | Agent console — every sub-agent (vision, synthesizers, repair…) streams its tokens live in its own colour. |
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| Scale — an architect agent and parallel module agents lay out a whole trapped-ion laser table. | Light computes — a χ⁽²⁾ half adder: CARRY is 631 nm sum-frequency light, SUM the depleted infrared. |
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| Build kit — BOM with part numbers and watertight, keyed, tiled baseplate STLs. | Build document — a Typst PDF with cover, plan view, BOM, assembly steps and laser-safety notes. |
Generated cover art (Nano Banana)
Rendered from the live 3D view plus a description of the design — faithful (Nano Banana 2, gemini-3.1-flash-image) keeps the real layout; cinematic (Nano Banana 2.1) stages it in a lab.
| Faithful — AOM double-pass | Faithful — all-optical half adder | Cinematic — all-optical half adder | Cinematic — AOM double-pass |
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Build documents
What it does
- Find a paper — live arXiv search; figures are ranked by how much they look like an optical setup.
- Read the figure — three vision agents read it in parallel; a consensus vote + millimetre scaling turns it into a component/beam graph.
- Synthesize & verify — two synthesizer agents build a design in our JSON IR; a tracer models Gaussian beams (ABCD/q), Jones polarization, power, AOM orders, fiber mode overlap and clipping; a verifier flags stray beams (laser safety), collisions, unplaced parts and unmet targets; a deterministic autofix adds validated beam dumps; a repair agent fixes the rest — all under a hard 115 s deadline.
- Fly-in & align — parts drop from the drawing onto the 3D bench, beams switch on, the bench is misaligned "as built" and an alignment tuner walks every knob back to optimum.
- Publish — a journal-cover render (Nano Banana 2) and a Typst build document PDF: cover, plan view, verification, BOM with part numbers, 3D-print list, step-by-step assembly, alignment procedure, laser-safety notes.
- Build kit —
BOM.csv, watertight tiled baseplate STLs with keyed alignment-pin holes and beam-path grooves, a PyOpticL/FreeCAD script, and an assembly README.
Also: goal → design (best-of-N candidates), hierarchical design of whole apparatus (an architect + parallel module agents with shared laser power budgets; e.g. a 121-optic Sr⁺ trapped-ion laser system), an agent console with per-agent colour-coded streaming tokens, and all-optical logic (SOA NAND, χ⁽²⁾ sum-frequency half adder).
Measured (2026-10-25)
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| Paper search → PDF, live, end to end | 1:37 (budget 3:00) |
| Figure → verified design (tweezers, 3 live runs) | 55 / 67 / 74 s, all PASS |
| Demo-figure reproduction reliability | 3/3 PASS, 41–55 s (concurrent) |
| Goal → verified design | ~45–85 s, scores 93–98 |
| 121-element apparatus trace + verify | ~6 ms |
| argon PyOpticL-API hallucination, zero-shot → grounded | 95 % → 0 % |
| 8-figure open-access benchmark | 4/8 reproduce pass verification (3/8 physically faithful), 4/4 goal designs pass |
| Backend tests | 123 passing |
Details and honest caveats: demo/DEMO.md, demo/figures/RESULTS.md.
Run it
# API key: put a Gemini API key in ../gemini_key (one line) or export GEMINI_API_KEY
cd backend && uv sync && uv run uvicorn server:app --port 8001 # no --reload for demos
cd web && npm install && npm run build # backend serves web/dist
open http://localhost:8001
# dev mode: cd web && VITE_API_TARGET=http://localhost:8001 npm run dev · offline mock: ?mock=1
Requires Python ≥ 3.12 + uv, Node ≥ 20, and Typst on PATH for the PDF.
Layout
backend/optics/ design IR (ir.py), tracer, verifier, autofix, tuner, merge, diff, BOM + STL, Typst build doc, PyOpticL export
backend/agents/ Gemini pipelines: design, reproduce, hierarchical, papers, cover, console events, LLM client
backend/server.py FastAPI + SSE API (see CONTRACT.md)
web/ Vite + React + three.js app (viewer, agent console, fly-in, tuning tour, build kit)
demo/ runbook, recorded runs, benchmark figures (CC BY / CC0, see demo/figures/catalog.json), renders, PDFs
paper/ LaTeX paper describing the system
Provenance: built today vs pre-existing
Built during the hackathon (2026-10-25, 11:23 → present; see git log) — everything in this repository:
the design IR and API contract; the planar Gaussian-beam/Jones tracer including nonlinear elements (SOA, SFG,
saturable absorber); the verifier, autofix, alignment tuner and module merge; all agent pipelines (goal → design,
figure → design, hierarchical, paper search, cover renders, console events and token streaming); the PyOpticL
exporter; BOM, tiled STL baseplates and the Typst build document; the web application; all examples, benchmarks,
recorded runs, figures, the paper and the demo video. The code was written by an AI coding assistant (Claude Code)
and its sub-agents under the team's direction during the event.
Pre-existing, used but not built by us:
- PyOpticL (Myers et al., Quantum 2026) — the code-to-CAD optics concept and library our exporter targets and our examples are modelled on. Not vendored; referenced only.
- Google Gemini models via API:
gemini-4-argon (agents), Nano Banana 2 / 2.1 (gemini-3.1-flash-image, gemini-nano-banana-2.1) for renders, Gemini TTS (demo narration).
- Open-source libraries: three.js, React, @react-three/fiber, @react-three/drei, zustand, lucide-react, Vite, TypeScript; FastAPI, Pydantic, NumPy, google-genai, httpx, sse-starlette, uvicorn, manifold3d, trimesh, Pillow; Typst; ffmpeg.
- Published figures used as test inputs — open-access CC BY / CC0 figures with attribution in
demo/figures/catalog.json; the PyOpticL paper Fig. 2a (CC BY 4.0). Figures from other arXiv papers (e.g. Gieseler et al., arXiv:2004.05246) are fetched live at runtime and not redistributed.
License
MIT for the code in this repository (see LICENSE). Third-party figures keep their original licenses
(see demo/figures/catalog.json). Prices in generated BOMs are estimates; verify with vendors. Not a substitute
for a laser-safety review.
