Gauging interest for a live auction of Laser lab being downsized

[catalanjo]

@ " I suppose you just used a nice big juicy argon with an Etalon fitted?".......
That's certainly what I always did !
Cheers

[mixedgas]

My holography was not holo in the imaging sense. We were shooting Holo gratings, made of specially doped, polarization sensitive liquid crystals mixed in a UV photopolymer. The LC materials rotated to match the incoming polarization vector sum, and then in a few more seconds the photopolymer started to initiate its cure, and lock them in place. Sensitizer was a Rose Bengal molecule with a twist. So I had to build a widget that let both reference beams rotate to any polarization including elliptical.
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Laser was a Spectra Physics Argon product with Piezos on both rear mirror axis adjustments and a "Z" piezo on the mirror, plus an heated Etalon.. Aka "Z-lok". "Z" lock stabilized the laser to 1 Gigahertz... We ran at 351 nm Argon line....
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Z lock spent one hour and 45 minutes stabilizing itself, hands off at a touch of a button.. Well to a point, in the UV it still needed me to rough align the prism. But it stored all the stable tunings, at 1 Ghz spacings, and then in theory, next morning you came in and in 15 minutes, you were locked.
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Only problem is before I joined the lab, the students thought the "start" button on the "Z-lok" module needed pressed every time they started the laser... It was wondered why they were not getting good images.
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That got covered over with a label gun, very FAST!

Steve

[hakzaw1]

....is all this going to be on the exam??

J/K ...thanks all for the info. hk

[Eidetic]

Sounds like HPDLC material. At Wright Patterson? I've worked with that type of material for the past 14 years. I know the "Z-lock" helps prevent mode hops, but didn't think it increased coherence length.

[mixedgas]

RE WP AF,

Our professor might have been one of their friends. I saw the paintings by real Aliens! I did get to see some of the Alien Internee paintings, but not this set, the ones I saw were landscapes, not demons...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcxGcLLxjyY
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Now you guys know where the myth of Ohio's frozen aliens comes from. German World War II Alien internees, when the word Alien had a different meaning.


Steve

[alaurasecrets]

Pending sale on the sp125 laser