To Do
- Profile Evan's laser
- Move stuff into the other lab
- Get access to the other lab (key)
- Play with the chemicals list some more (Need to talk to Andy about this)
Laser + new lab
- Koch doesnt want me to take kochlab-daq2 to the new lab, so i will try to dig up an older computer to do so
- We did set it up and took a look yesterday
- The laser is 1.6W, Koch advises me to be extra careful with this laser
- Also need Andy to tell me where the IR imaging cards are
- Will try to use the CCD camera and labview to analyze the beam
- We will try it at it's threshold power to for safety
- Will then try with ND filters
- Eventually we want to try it out at full power, but I'm afraid of melting ND filters
- CCD Cam successfully installed on daq2
Laser Images
- Currently, the laser has been running for ~20mins, which should be sufficient warm up time
- I will trying to look at the laser with its power ~38mW
- Note: Koch set it to 50mw, then before i left to get some optics it was 43mw, now its only saying 38mw
- Will also place a ND3 filter in front of the CCD
- Took a pic at 13in away, nd 3 filter, 8.65A, 11% .02W
Analysis
- It has been almost a year since the last time I tried doing this, so I kinda forgot how I did it
- Here are the notes from when I did it last year. They are on the private wiki so those w/o access can email me if they really want to read them
- For the second photo, the max value is only 248, meaning that the photo is not saturated (255 is saturated according to me last year)
- Following my old methods, multiply 248 by 1/e^2 = 33.5
- pixles 220 and 476, distance of 256.
- 256 times 5.6e-6 1.4e-3 meters
- We did it again at a further distance. got a worse pic and a smaller beam width?
- Giving up, we tried beam expanders
- The beam expanders did work a bit, but we were unsure how to image that beam
- We tried the nightvision camera, but it was over saturated by the laser
- End note: Koch feels that trying to beam profile is possible but much too time consuming
- He wants to try to tweeze with the anyway
- I wonder how we will know where the beam waist is w/o this data. I guess I do have 1 measurement of the beam diameter
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