Photonics Projects
Throughout my time at the Zelevinsky Lab, I worked on a variety of optics technologies ranging from an assortment of laser sources to a variety of amplification and modulation techniques.
ECDL Seed Lasers
I built all of the seed lasers used in the cooling of CaH. The seed lasers were Littrow lasers built using custom brass components. For BaH cooling I constructed a number of home-built Litman-Metcalf lasers from a mix of custom components and off the shelf optics.
High Power Lasers
In our hands, the seed ECDL's do not provide enough power for cooling; therefore, I hand built 6 injection locking amplifiers that provided sufficient power for CaH molecule cooling. I have also worked with visible and infrared tapered amplifiers, IR Raman fiber amplifiers, and pulsed IR Nd:YAG lasers.
EOM's and AOMs
All of the lasers used in my experiments required frequency modulation to address the hyperfine structure of the molecule. To that end I built EOMs and tuned their tank circuits to impedance match and maximize the resonant Q factor.
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I have also design and built RF signal systems implementing direct digital synthesizers, voltage-controlled oscillators, RF mixers, and amplifiers. The RF electronics powered the frequency modulators used in the experiment.
In Vacuum Optics
I designed and hand built a collection optics systems to be placed in the vacuum chamber during slowing experiments. I hand machined and painted the mounting hardware.
LightTools/Zeemax Simulations
I simulated the collection efficiency for the optical system used in the CaH and BaH data acquisition. This served as a sanity check to verify the overall signal recorded in the datasets I published.
I simulated the background scatter of the 3D MOT chamber and designed an in-vacuum optics system to capture light emitted by molecules during slowing and cooling. This system included a Fourier filter to eliminate background scatter from windows and the chamber walls without cutting the molecular signal.