(a wee update I just sent in for the weekly school newsletter at Vic)
Justin and I have spent the last week at the Spectra-Physics factory in Santa Clara, California (in the middle of Silicon Valley). This is the very factory that gave birth to our own ultrafast laser that now resides on the second floor of the Alan MacDiarmid building.
Our advanced-training week consisted of about 30 seconds spent misaligning a state-of-the-art femtosecond laser beyond the point of operation, followed by four days realigning & optimizing the whole thing from front to back. Dmitriy Vorobyev, a powerful laser wizard from central Russia, was our guide on this journey. Dmitriy enjoys California’s all-you-can-eat lunch restaurants, but misses getting caught in a good Russian blizzard. He is also an extraordinarily knowledgeable and patient teacher, laughing off the occasional burnt hose or finger.
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| Justin, Alex and Dmitriy |
The purpose of our training was to achieve greater independence in keeping our laser running optimally, since waiting several weeks for a technician to get us back on our feet is a complete drag. We are now hotly anticipating getting home to tweak previously forbidden mirrors, gratings and other knobs in search of more brief, intense and consistent pulses of light.
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| Optimizing the pump and seed beam overlap in a Ti:Sapphire amplifier |
Having spent the week constrained to the side of the highway that boasted only two places to eat (see attached directions for the perilous highway crossing), we’re looking forward to a change of scenery. We are currently en route to the Gordon Research Conference on Electronic Processes in Organic Materials in Tuscany, where we will join our lab mate Kai, who was not able to make it to California.
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| All we wanted was to cross the road. Turns out it was a 3 km walk |
