Back to Work

Alright, the reflectivity of the mirror appears to have been unaffected by application and removal of the nail polish as evidenced by the figure. I still don't know why there is so much noise on the reflectivity measurement. Perhaps I should bin the data. We'll worry about finessing it when it comes time to publish.

My glans polarizer for my conoptics optical isolator finally arrived today! So, now I can finally get back to building and locking my doubling cavity. My goal is to be most of the way towards a MOT next week. Then I can start spending time on my Raman lasers.

Reflectivity of Elliptical Mirror

Today, I was finally able to make a good reflectivity measurement of the mirror that we want to use to convert the MOT to an LVIS. We have been trying to make this measurement using a spectrometer that we chopped out of a NuSkin laser unit. However, shot to shot the spectrometer was not very stable and so when we went to process the reflectivity measurements the lineshape of the LED's spectrum was imposed upon the data. We borrowed an ocean optics spectrometer, which was much more stable and gave us the data below. Since it matches up with the manufacturers specifications for the reflectivity, we'll call that good enough.

I then painted the mirror with nail polish clear base coat, let it dry, and cleaned it off with spectroscopically pure acetone followed by methanol. Tomorrow we'll see if that effects the reflectivity of the mirror. Then we'll coat it again to protect it while we grind and drill it. Hopefully, we find that the grinding and drilling won't effect the flatness of the mirror.

The Skinny

So, want to see something disturbing? The top picture is a picture of my dad and I last summer at a splash pool in Albuquerque. Just for the record, dad is actually sucking in his gut there while I push mine out. The bottom picture is a picture of us last weekend after cross country skiing. I think we actually look skinnier with our snow gear on. Needless to say we've lost a lot of weight. How? Well, to be honest we took a fertility drug, but despite our best efforts neither of us got pregnant. We definitely do not recommend HCG to any men wanting to have a baby. For weight loss, however, it ain't so bad.