Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Annual Meeting of the APS Four Corners Section
Volume 60, Number 11
Friday–Saturday, October 16–17, 2015; Tempe, Arizona
Session B1: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics I |
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Chair: Jose Menenedez, Arizona State University Room: MU236 |
Friday, October 16, 2015 10:50AM - 11:14AM |
B1.00001: Simple generation and measurement of twisted light with orbital angular momentum Invited Speaker: Mark Siemens We normally think of light as traveling straight between points in space, but beams of light can rotate as they travel. In the simplest rotating beams, individual light particles (photons) spin as they travel and this ``spin angular momentum'' has been well understood for about 100 years. But less than 25 years ago, the ``orbital angular momentum'' form of rotation was discovered that leads to ``twisted light'' with a helical phase. Twisted light has many exciting applications, including controlling tiny micromachines, measuring star rotation, enabling super-high-resolution imaging, and allowing communication with theoretically-unlimited bandwidth. Conventional methods for generating and measuring twisted light involved either expensive and fixed-wavelength optics or computer-controlled electro-optics such as a spatial light modulator. In this talk, I will review the applications of twisted light, and also discuss our research into very simple methods for generating and measuring light's OAM. Using off-the-shelf optical components such as lenses and optical fiber, we demonstrate 1.) tunable generation of twisted light with OAM up to $\pm.8\hbar$ per photon, and 2.) quantitative OAM measurement. These simple and inexpensive methods of manipulating light's OAM should reduce the barrier to using twisted light in new technologies. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 16, 2015 11:14AM - 11:26AM |
B1.00002: Petawatt class Laser with High Repetition Rate for the excitation of x-ray lasers Alex Rockwood, Yong Wang, Shoujun Wang, Bradley Luther, Jorge Rocca X-ray lasers require powerful pump sources for excitation. We describe a Ti:sapphire laser designed to generated pulses of 0.45 Petawatt peak power at multi-Hz repetition rates. The laser consists of a Ti:sapphire master oscillator and chain of five Ti:sapphire amplifiers operating in chirped-pulse amplification. The last stages of amplification are pumped by the frequency doubled output of Nd:glass slab ampliers. The first tests of the Ti:sapphire amplier chain produced pulses of 32 J energy before compression with a central wavelength of 800 nm, with uniform beam profile. Compression to 50 fs in a 70{\%} efficient grating compressor will yield a peak power of 0.45 Petawatts. This use of the system in the excitation of sub- 100nm wavelength soft x-ray lasers will be discussed. [Preview Abstract] |
Friday, October 16, 2015 11:26AM - 11:38AM |
B1.00003: Design and Characterization of a Simple Integrator Feedback Control Lockbox Daniel Crunkelton, Scott D. Bergesen, John Ellsworth, Merideth Dahl, Christopher Running A report of the performance of a laser frequency lock box using only integral feedback gain. In a first design of this box, we used a regular printed circuit board (PCB). However, our DC-DC Voltage Converter produced spurious noise signals in the 10 kHz frequency range with an amplitude of 200 mV, making our lock boxes useless. The newly-designed lock box incorporates a copper ground plane and large capacitors. The noise in the circuit is now in the sub-mV range, allowing us to lock our lasers with minimal error. [Preview Abstract] |
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