Swans on Tea

I was decreasing the local entropy in a small part of my abode and found a shoebox full of photos which happened to contain a few shots of my grad school lab, in all its glory. We were building an interferometer which would use cold atoms, which means relatively large deBroglie wavelengths and a [...]

One of the things we’re investigating is pulsed laser systems, because they’re fun, but (especially for funding purposes) also because they are the basis of optical frequency combs (as I’ve mentioned). And things are pulsing along. One of the things that was noticed was that light from the pulsed system, running at 1560 [...]

I was wiring up some stuff in the lab, and wondered what color-coding we had used for that component on the prototype.
“It’s red” was the almost immediate reply.

Duh. I had expunged this from the buffer. They’re almost all red. That’s why we went with color coding — so much easier than labels.

The fastest clock in the world, my ass.
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Oooooh. It displays six whole digits past the decimal. Down to the microsecond. (can you sense the sarcasm?) It’s a display. Just because it reads that many digits doesn’t mean the measurement [...]

Who needs a lever, man? I’m Marty McFly.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you needed to move a heavy piece of equipment you’re helping to build. And you have the constraints of not wanting to tip it, and the course you need to navigate has some spots with less than 10 [...]

The previous MOT video showed the atoms squirting out of the side when the trapping field was turned off. In this video things are more balanced, and you can see the atoms remaining in the beam overlap region, and fluorescing quite brightly. The trap is cycled on and off and you can see [...]

My, what bright, glowing optical fibers you have.
One of my online compatriots recently explained a quick and easy way to do some IR photography. I felt compelled to try, and it was pretty easy. Cheap webcams are the most direct way to do this for a few reasons:
— they’re cheap. [...]

No, not that kind of trick, you pervert*.
I was doing some homemade wiring, and whether it’s power or signal, you generally want to use twisted-pair (or triplet, or quad, etc.). It’s faster than running all of the single-wire, so there’s a labor-saving aspect to it, but there’s a data quality aspect to it as [...]

No, not of an alien at the window.
Here’s a little movie showing atoms being trapped and mistreated. What you’re seeing is a video of the monitor that’s hooked up to a little IR camera on the vacuum chamber. The really bright spot that’s squirming around a little are the atoms, or technically, the [...]

One project over the last several weeks has been winding coils for the atomic fountains. There are two different requirements, one is the so-called “C-field” coils and the second is the MOT (magneto-optic trap) coil pair.
The “C-field” is the bias field in an atomic clock that essentially tells the atoms which way [...]

BBC was in the lab yesterday, filming . . . something. I mostly stayed out of the way, except to utter, “I’m putting my secret stash in here!” within earshot of one of the crew, and then making sure everyone understood it was my secret stash of titanium bolts. (Titanium bolts will get [...]

I’ve always wanted a huge double-pole, double-throw knife switch in the lab, because you can’t utter that phrase without it, but it’s probably a bad idea.
So you settle (just a little)

Because sometimes you just need to run a few hundred amps through something …