At Bell Labs, Cable became involved in a series of experiments on a low-temperature atom manipulation technique known as "optical molasses".
[6] Cable hoped to make a business out of it, entering the emerging market for the newly invented microscope.
[5][6] In November 1989, he left Bell Labs to pursue the business full-time, naming it Thorlabs[5] which he founded in the basement of his Newton, New Jersey home.
[8] He returned to Sussex County, and has made an effort to keep the business headquartered there due to his love for the area.
[3] According to data published by Gale Business Insights, the company had estimated sales of $199.8 million in 2013, the most recent full-year available[9] and had 1,500 employees as of 2016.
[10] He sits on the advisory board of the Center for Automation Technologies and Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
[4] While working at Bell Labs, Cable was part of a "lunchtime conversation" that led to a number of experiments which investigated atomic behavior at very low temperatures involving himself, Arthur Ashkin, John Bjorkholm, Steven Chu, and Leo Holberg.
[3] Subsequently, Cable was listed as a co-author on three papers in Physical Review Letters starting in 1985 that collectively have been cited more than 3700 times.
[11] The first of those papers, "Three-dimensional viscous confinement and cooling of atoms by resonance radiation pressure", led to Chu and his Stanford colleagues winning the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics.