Our AOSense strontium source, with integrated oven, Zeeman slower, and 2D MOT, arrived yesterday! (After a few months of delays…)
We’ll test the 461 nm absorption of the atom beam in the coming days.
We already have our AR coated viewports, so once our vacuum pumps and the chamber itself arrives next month, we will be ready to pump down and bake out our chamber! Our cooling lasers are locked up and ready to go, so we should have strontium trapped in a MOT not long after that…
Congrats to UW-Madison undergradaute Sam Li, who has been awarded a Welton Sophomore Honors Summer Apprenticeship to work with us in the Kolkowitz Lab this summer! Sam will be working with grad students Aedan and Matt on implementing spin-to-charge conversion in the NV center confocal microscope.
Congrats to Matt Cambria, who has officially accepted the UW-Madison Physics PhD program’s offer of admission! Matt will be (re)joining the Kolkowitz group as a graduate student after working with us as a volunteer researcher this past year.
Undergraduate researcher Brett Merriman gave an excellent presentation on his work on injection locking for our strontium 461 nm laser cooling system at the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium!
Congratulations to Megan and Aedan, who were both selected for the prestigious and selective National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship program!
Only a month and a half after moving into our brand new lab space both the strontium optical lattice clock experiment and the nitrogen-vacancy center experiment have achieved some major milestones!
On the strontium clock our blue master laser is now stably locked to our strontium heat pipe. Here’s the first error signal from sideband saturated absorption spectroscopy of the heat pipe, taken by Xin:
In addition, the last of the components of the vacuum apparatus were ordered, and we have finalized the design for our MOT coils:
On the NV center experiment we observed both coherent Rabi flopping of single NV electron spins and g2 photon anti-bunching for the first time this week!
In other news, a “Lab News” page has been added to the group website, which will be occasionally (and almost certainly somewhat inconsistently) updated with exciting developments such as these…