Atomic and Optical Physics Laboratory located at G09 Shineman Center provides you an opportunity to work with variety of electronics and optoelectronics devices. The lab is equipped with following instruments to support our ongoing experiments. In addition we are equipped with two-modern computer work stations with LABVIEW and MATLAB for data aquisition, processing and analysis.

External-Cavity Diode Lasers

The lab is equipped with two homemade external-cavity diode laser (ECDL) systems.

High Precision Wavelength Meter

High Finesse WS6-600 series high precision wavelength meter provides 600 MHz absolute accuracy for laser wavelength measurements.

Low-Expansion Fabry-Perot Optical Cavity

Burleigh extremely low-expansion Fabry-Perot cavity is used for laser diagnostics, laser scan frequency linearization as well as frequency calibration.

PID-Controllers

SRS (Standford Research Systems) SIM Series SIM960 — Analog PID Controller

with 100 kHz bandwidth provides excellent stability for our demanding control applications such as laser frequency stabilization (laser lock) and optical cavity length stabilization (cavity lock).

Lock-in Amplifiers

SR844 — 200 MHz wide bandwidth lock-in amplifier is used in phase sensitive detection applications such as two-step atomic excitation. The method provides zero-background high signal-to-noise data allowing us to detect extremely small signals.

Balanced Detectors

Thorlabs PDB450A switchable gain balanced photodetector is used with applications where subtraction of two simultaneous signals is required such as saturation absorption spectroscopy. This will also allow us to eliminate common mode noise associated with these signals.

LabVIEW Data Acquisition and Signal Processing

We use NI LabVIEW along with PCI multi-function I/O device and BNC DAQ device for data collection and processing. Data analysis is done using MATLAB.