Drilling with Light

Shinbrough, Kai

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/114287 Copy

Description

Title

Drilling with Light

Author(s)

Shinbrough, Kai

Contributor(s)

• Hunt, Benjamin D.
• Park, Sehyun

Issue Date

2022

Keyword(s)

• Physics
• IQUIST

Abstract

Feel the surface of an old lightbulb and you might notice it’s warm; focus the sun’s rays on a piece of paper and you might get it to smolder; but chop laser light into pulses of 5 nanosecond duration, amplify each pulse to an energy of 40 mJ, and you have enough light power to drill into solid metal. This process is more accurately called laser ablation; in this experiment, we ablate chunks of solid barium using only the power of light, and we investigate the behavior of the atoms in the gas phase after ablation. The ray of white light traveling left to right in the photograph above is a ‘probe beam’ we use to determine how the atoms are behaving after ablation, and the gray rocks are solid barium held under argon atmosphere. If you look closely, you can see a black spot on the tip of the centermost barium chunk—this is a millimeter scale depression in the solid metal caused by our focused laser light. We plan to use this gaseous source of metal atoms in a collaboration between the Lorenz (Quantum Optics) and Eden (Laser Physics) research groups to store and retrieve quantum states of light.

Type of Resource

• Text
• Image

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/114287

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Kai Shinbrough

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