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…

 

 

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!

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…