Lab 19 Wrap-Up

Lab 19 met in the lecture room for a trip down memory lane. I followed the sequence of labs, describing how they built on one-another to give you all a good exposure to the optics lab: environment, procedures, tools, lasers, optical components, experiment design, error budgeting, and the physics of diffraction, interference, image formation, and polarization. For me the class was a blast to teach and you all have been the best set of students I could imagine - inquisitive, responsible, creative, good team workers, and go-getters. I'd be proud to have any of you on an experiment team.

The final is 7:30 December 7 in PS 306, where we met for the last class. I have all your presentations and we'll project them on the screen. My plan is to have a book or CD with all the presentations as a class momento. If you would like to invite anyone along, please feel free to do so. In the meantime, best wishes for success in your other classes' finals. I hope getting the presentations fully prepared early helped there.

Lastly, Dr. Terebey and I will be conducting a quantum optics experiment starting next quarter on photon orbital angular momenta - if you are interested in participating, please see her. It will involve a Mach-Zehnder setup on the table, some new components, mounts, digital data taking, and hopefully some fun results that may lead to further work on orbital angular momentum spectroscopy of natural photon streams.

Lab 18 Prep / Materials

Preparedness will be demonstrated by sharing presentation status - you should have slide titles and content identified. Final versions are due Wednesday.

Today is lab notebook review for those who don't have a "bye".

The table will be open until 7:50.

Some possibilities for work on the table during class time include: a Sagnac (ring laser) interferometer; a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with a microscope slide in one arm to generate path differences and fringe modulation, solutions to various made-up alignment puzzles, michelson fringe imaging w/ the camera to assess wavefront error.

After 7:50 there is a holography experiment scheduled on the table that needs the room dark.

Lab 17 Wrap Up

Tonight Team "Wednesday" was tasked with creating a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) from scratch on the table. While some online notes suggest that an MZI is easier to align than a Michelson, I think everyone in the class would disagree. The MZI has an extra degree of freedom at each of the two 45-degree angle mirrors that is coupled to its rotation around the vertical axis. Of these two degrees of freedom, the Michelson only has the rotational degree of freedom - the return mirrors can be placed anywhere along the direction of the arms and still obtain laser fringes. Here's a diagram showing the MZI coupled degrees of freedom:

Aligning optics on a table is a little like riding a bicycle. After a while your body just "gets it" as you learn the effect of exercising each of the many degrees of freedom in an optic's mount. Of course you need to have an overall alignment strategy as well, such as working optic by optic down-beam. In this alignment, the "aha" moment is when you translate and rotate the mirror at the same time, keeping the location "A" constant. Having a second location "B" helps a lot.

We learned several other alignment tricks. "Chopping" a card in and out of beam rapdily by hand as the card is moved downstream gives a strong and fairly persistent visual impression of the beam's location in 3D akin to as if there were smoke or mist to mark the beam's location. This trick is especially helpful if there are features (bolt-hole row, tape w/ line down middle) on the table showing the direction the beam should go. I'll post up the other trick later.

Here are some in-progress alignment photos:

This one showing mirror translation along a bolt-hole row, and below, showing by-eye alignment looking down a bolt-hole row from one end of the table to make sure everything is in the right place. It is amazing how important it is to keep moving around the table and eye-balling optic locations! It is just too darned easy to plop things down off-by-one because of the repetitive pattern on the table top.

Oh, by the way, the fringes were good:

I'll hold open lab Friday 1PM on.
Good Thanksgiving everyone!

Lab 17

... is a repeat of 16 with team assignments swapped.


Above: Team "Monday MZ" fringes from their Mach-Zehnder interferometer.

Look ahead:
Your FINAL presentation in digital or (scannable) paper form is due next Wednesday, December 2.
Your DRAFT presentation (slide titles and content identified) is due next Monday, November 30.
Your lab notebooks will be reviewed Monday (Lab 18). Some of you have byes on this for having stupendous notebooks last time and already have full credit on this score.

Prep today will be a status on your presentations:
Lab work begun
Lab work finished
Lab work written up
Presentation slide titles complete
Presentation draft content complete
Presentation final content complete

Remember that I will be reviewing your lab notebook at the time of the presentations.

Lab 16 Materials

Lab 16 Plan of the Day
Lab 16: Mach-Zehnder Interferometer
Self-Assessment (note addition of more of/less of items)

Today and Wednesday we'll break into 2 groups. One group will build a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and the other will learn optics cleaning techniques. Then on Wednesday we'll switch. The interferometer build will take 1-2 hours.

Here's a pdf with optics cleaning instructions:
Meilse Griot cleaning instructions.
Because of the importance of minimizing damage to an optic's surface, cleaning is done very carefully. Many years of experience has developed a practical and safe approach. The key ingredient is patience and losing all desire to rush. A little practice helps too.

Lab 16 Prep

There is no separate prep package. Work on your projects. Be prepared to give status of work accomplished (not time spent, or work planned).
I have a pile of photos from Friday's open lab. Too many to email or upload. Instead I'll burn them to CDs and bring them to lab. I note, however, that with 5 dozen photos it is hard to keep track. My advice for future photo taking is that you write a little placard to appear in the frame when the photo is taken to identify it better.
I'll post up this one photo though. It was the highlight of the day when Sy's Mach-Zehnder interferometer gave fringes.

Lab 15 Materials

This post is the plan of the day.
1) Demonstrate preparedness
2) Quantum optics snippit - polarization tagging
3) One-on-one presentation topic & plan review
4) Open Lab w/ Michelson layout & polarizers

Lab 15 Prep

There is no separate prep package. Your preparation has 2 parts:
1) Write a paragraph (or more) describing your plan for the final presentation. Your plan should include a short technical description, an estimate of the amount of table time you will need, and a timeline for accomplishing the project. Refer to the presentation rules given during lab 12. Key dates are: presentation is evening of 12/7 and a hardcopy/digital version is due on the last day of class. I will spend about 10 minutes with each of you discussing your project during lab 15.
2) Review your lab notes for the last experiment, where we polarization tagged the arms of a Michelson interferometer. Generate a 1-page description of the experiment and the results. Make a note of something you would like to try differently or in addition. Write a simple procedure for doing that and incorporate it into your table work during the open lab.

Lab 14 Material Available

At the moment it is a draft, I'll do some reorganizing for class but this is the content:
Lab 14 Materials

Lab 14 Prep Package Available

Lab 14 Prep Package
...in which you will further explore the Michelson interferometer, including a quantum mechanical calculation of its fringe pattern.

Lab 13 Photos

Lab 13 was to build a Michelson interferometer and obtain first fringes. Both teams were successful, achieving fringes in an hour or less. Here are some photos.

Team A planning their buildup and alignments. The team came up with a perforated card as an alignment aid that was used to ensure the beam was a constant height above the table.

Team B doing their layout. Fringes obtained at t=1 hour using shimmed and hand-touch alignments. Not bad!

Lab 13 Material Available

Lab 13 Plan of the Day
Lab 13 Michelson Interferometer First Fringes
Self-assessment

Lab 13 Prep Package Available

We are starting the Michelson interferometer sequence. Monday we'll build the first iteration and detect fringes if all goes well. The prep package is to warm you up with a historical perspective and to get you thinking about alignments.
Lab 13 Prep Package

Lab 12 Materials Available

Today's main topics will be lab notebook review and open lab. Be sure to bring your lab notebook!
Lab 12 Plan of the Day
"Final" presentation rules and procedures
Self-Assessment
Please record on your self assessment what you want more of and what you want less of in the lab.

Lab 12 Prep

Lab 12 is Notebook review and open lab. Prep is bringing your lab books up to date and planning your open lab time.

Lab 11 Photos

Last week we brought the old 8-inch 1970-ish telescope up from the store-room where it had been gathering dust. First task: clean it up and prep it for bringing into the lab.

A little elbow grease and damp sponges cleaned off most of the external gunk. Once in the lab, we took out the mirror and found the aluminum coating to be in bad shape. Certainly time for it to be recoated. But first, we'll have fun with it doing a Foucault test to check its figure. Mirrors with pretty bad optical surfaces can still produce images.

A Foucault test is an optical test at center of curvature, often used by amateur telescope makers while "figuring" a mirror to its final shape. The test uses simple equipment to assess the shape of the mirror to within 1/4 wavelength of light or so. It is not as accurate as surface metrology done with an interferometer, but instead of needing $50,000 worth of equipment, you can use stuff that is probably lying around the house. Or lab.

We upgraded the usual Foucault instrument to include a CCD camera to capture the upstream view of the mirror for all to view. In the "classic" Foucault test the procedure is to eyeball it.
Here you see the LED gooseneck lamp that is illuminating a slightly off-axis frosted 1 mm diaphram opening. The frosting is achieved with a piece of Scotch-brand magic tape. This diffuse light source in turn illuminates the mirror, which is located two focal lengths (1 radius of curvature) downstream. Near the focus is a probe on a mounting post. A knife edge is often used. We used a chisel from the toolbox since it comes with a built-in handle for mounting. Later on, Jacob suggested using a pin instead and swapped out the chisel for a mechanical pencil with its 700 micron diameter lead extended, which is what you see here:


Looking upstream from before the pencil, here's what the cell phone camera captured. The bright light on the telescope mirror is the out-of-focus image of the frosted diaphragm, which is located behind and to the left of the camera. To take this picture, I moved the camera until I could see the image of the frosted diaphragm go into the lens of the camera.


Of course, it's not really an experiment without data, so here's the data off the camera when the probe is inserted at a point very near the focus. A perfect mirror would show a uniform disk with varying brightness as the probe was moved to the focal point. But an imperfect mirror doesn't focus all the light at the focal point, some misses. So with the probe at the focal point, the light that misses keeps on going and enters the camera. What you can see here is that the light coming from the edges of the mirror is not blocked, while the light coming off the center is mostly blocked.

The outer edge has a different focal length, by a small amount (several mm) than the middle. By playing with the probe, Paul found that the edge rays came to a focus farther out, so the edge of the mirror has a longer radius of curvature than the middle. This so-called "turned-down-edge" is a common aberration in amateur-class telescopes. The amount present here is pretty small, and probably doesn't noticeably affect image quality for visual observations with this telescope.

Finally, some boardwork on the Zernike functions used to describe aberrations of optical systems. These functions, defined over the unit circle in RxR, form a linear vector space much like sines and cosines do. An arbitrary function on the unit disk can be written as a linear combination of Zernikes. The usefulness comes from the ability to map physical effects onto Zernikes when doing "forensics" in an effort to understand and potentially correct aberrations. Low order terms correspond to mis-pointing, out-of-focus, off-axis, and mount-induced aberrations.

Lab 11 Prep Package Available

Lab 11 Prep Package
Wednesday will be lab notebook review, so be sure to bring yours. We will be making improvement agreements.
There will be open lab this Friday 1PM-5PM.

Lab 10 Materials Available

There is no slide set for today's Lab. We'll be dissecting an old telescope.
Lab 10 Plan of the Day
Self-Assessment

Lab 10 Prep Package Available

Lab 10 Prep Package

Lab 9 Error Budgets & Chopping

Julian's Lab 9 data
If you want to add additional data you recorded to this spreadsheet, drop Julian a note (or me and I will forward).

Lab 9 was all about error budgeting an experiment. An error budget not only is a guide to understanding the sources of uncertainty in an experiment once you have data in hand, but it is also a powerful tool in experiment design. Once you know the big contributors, you can spend some effort to make them smaller, improving the overall experiment. Where's Waldo the Error Budget in this picture?

In experiment 9, chopping was an important technique in reducing noise introduced by drifts. Here is some chopping in action as Jillian alternately allows a polarized and unpolarized beam to be sensed on the photometer in order to assess the noise introduced by laser polarization and intensity drifts.

Lab 9 Material Available

Lab 9 Plan of the Day
Lap 9 Experiment Error Budgets
Self-Assessment

Lab 9 Prep Package Available

Lab 9 Prep Package
Bring a laptop or calculator to lab on Monday.

Lab 8 Material Available

Lab 8 Plan of the Day
Lab 8 Materials - Quantitative Polarization
Self-Assessment Form

I hugely enjoyed this lab - preparing it, and watching you execute it. The teamwork both teams showed as you all worked beautifully together to get high-quality experimental results. It is clear that you all know and respect each other well enough to easily organize yourselves to complete a complex task. My hat is off to you all.

Julian sent me his team's data spreadsheet for sharing:
Team Julian Lab 8 Spreadsheet
Here is what the data looks like (blue squares) compared to a cos^2 law with a phase shift and amplitude that best "fits by eye" (red line).

The data clearly validates the model, Malus' law to within a few percent. A detailed study of this experimental dataset could be done to determine the degree to which the cos^2 law matches the data, perhaps someone will undertake this quantitative task. Also instructive would be a plot showing the uncorrected-for-drifts readings vs angle and the cos^2 law. Since the input beam intensity varied by 40%, the comparison would be graphic in showing the value of performing a chopping experiment. Instrumental drifts are invariably present at some level in every experiment. An experiment seeking the best possible sensitivity must take these drifts into account.

Above is a snapshot of the 2 polarizers with their mounts "blocked" using 1/4-20 bolts in the table to achieve a relatively repeatable position. This technique facilitates rapidly moving each polarizer out of the beam and back in at will without having to fuss much about obtaining correct placement. Just push it (gently) up against the blocking bolts.

Team John emailed me as well. Here is that team's data:
Team John Lab 8 Spreadsheet

Lab 8 Prep Package Available

Lab 8 Prep Package
Lab 8 will be a quantitative experiment to determine the angular dependence of the intensity of polarized light transmitted by a polarizing filter. To generate quantitative measurements we will be using the Photometer:


I will be catching a plane right after class, so we will be closing up at 8:30 PM, a little earlier than usual. On Monday, I'll open the lab up an hour early (5 PM) so you can continue any work that was left undone.

Lab 7 Wrap-up

Lab 7 worked even better than I hoped it would, exploring the vector nature of polarization with hand-held plastic polarizing film. One of my goals is to give you enough "touches on the ball" so you can develop a feel for how optical phenomenon behave. You have plenty of experience with balls, wheels, blocks, and so on. But we all have only limited opportunities in everyday life to manipulate light beyond turning on and off a switch. Every now and then just walking around you will see a curious optical phenomenon. I encourage you to "step outside the box" and take a closer look, take the time to come to some conclusions, and thereby add to your experiential base. You may want to carry around a small piece or two of polarizing film in your wallet just to have a fun investigatory tool.

LOL Labz

U r makin' me haz seen the lite!

Lab 7 Materials Available

I've been sent on a lightning trip by my day job to spend Monday morning at an out-of-town vendor, so lab 7 prep has been rather rushed. Even so, I managed to preflight on the table and to put together a simple lab guide. If you have some small transparent plastic items at home, you may want to bring them to class to use them in the last section.
Lab 7 Plan of the Day
Lab 7 Materials
Self-Assessment

Lab 6 Notes on Notebooks

In lab 6 I spent 5-10 minutes one-on-one going over lab notebooks. Some comments:

1. There is a wide range in style.
2. There is a wide range in quality.
3. Not everyone seemed satisfied with their notebooks.
4. Here's a strategy for improving your notebook:
--- Refer to the checklist in the material for Lab 1.
--- Review your notebook against the checklist.
--- Pick an area to improve.
--- Spend extra effort on that area until you see improvement.
--- Iterate.
5. Not many notebooks recorded lab procedures. These are necessary to reproduce a result.
6. Good notebooks can save you in the future from extra work redoing stuff that you just didn't bother to record. Get in the habit of recording everything that makes sense, especially puzzling facts.

I will review lab notebooks in class again. At that time we will make "improvement contracts". In the meantime, use the feedback provided and these comments as an opportunity to improve your practices. Out in the wild you will find it necessary to keep good lab records in order to make reliable progress on a project and be confident of the results.

Lab 7 Prep Package Available

Lab 7 Prep Package
Note that you will design an experiment and write the procedure for executing it. If you have or can borrow some polarizing sunglasses, bring them to class.

Lab 6 Materials Available

Lab 6 Plan of the Day
Your Lab Notebook!
Precision Stage Drawing Tree
Self-Assessment

Lab 5 Fringes - Cell Phone Photos

Here are 3 sets of fringes from the Lab 5 microscope slide experiment, one from each team's successful layout. An incident beam I reflects first off the front surface of the slide creating one reflected beam, and then off the back surface, creating another. These travel almost in the same direction, but not quite, due to the small tilt of surface S1 with respect to S2. This tilt is there because the slide surfaces are not perfectly parallel. The number of fringes and the size of the illumination spot on the slide measure the tilt angle, typically a few mrad.

Reflection geometry. Each reflection is about 4% as intense as incoming beam I. Not shown is the transmitted beam T that continues downward to the left.



The fringe orientation is due to the wedge orientation. In lab we rotated a slide to see that the "clock" angle of the fringes is tied to the slide, not to the rest of the optics.

We also tested what would happen if we overlapped the fringe pattern from one experiment bay on top of the beam from another experiment bay. Additional fringes or no additional fringes? At first sight we didn't see evidence for additional fringing - the pattern looked like the straight addition of the 2 fringe patterns rather than the interference of those 2 fringe patterns. Remember that the number of fringes is related to the angle between the two beams, with about 5 fringes per mrad. The two beams were incident at an angle of several hundred mrad, so there were of order a thousand of these new fringes across the pattern -- too many to resolve since there's more than one fringe per camera pixel. So we didn't see much new. If we had inserted some clever optics to overlay the two beams with a small, mrad sized, angle between them (like is done when you use 2 stacked slides), then what would we have seen at the detector/screen?

Lab 6 Prep Package Available

Lab 6 Prep Package
During Lab 6 I will review lab notebooks for feedback. Also, we will begin designing our precision tip-tilt stage for the precision interferometer experiments. Finally, there will be open lab.

Lab 5 Materials Available

PDFs for Lab 5 are available:
Lab 5 Plan of the Day
Lab 5 Microscope slide interference and metrology
Self-Assessment

This is the material that we will cover in the lab. It is different from the preparation package in the previous post. Do not confuse the lab materials with the preparation package!

On Wednesday the lab will include notebook review. Be sure you are all caught up with your notes and come ready to go over them with me for feedback on your notebook practices.

On Wednesday we will also begin designing precision stages for our Michelson interferometer experiment.

And, with luck, I will have sent some post drawings to the shop for fabrication. The luck being: there are good drawings to send on Monday, and the 1/2" stainless rod stock has arrived from McMaster-Carr.

Lab 5 Prep Package Available

This is the work to complete before class. I may post the lab notes prior. But they are not the preparation package. Preparation packages contain exercises for you to do and record in your lab notebook. Think of them as homework.

Lab 5 Prep Package ... in which you will explore the small angle approximation, analyze your diffraction pattern data, and generate a mechanical drawing.

Lab 4 - Fringes and Interference

Working at the table with Cornell Plates to generate diffraction and interference patterns. Several captured with cell phone cameras are below:

Double slit interference pattern

Airy disk from a round aperture made with a diaphragm

The camera is now working, this is its first fringe from #2 double slit on a Cornell Plate. Below is a slice through the intensity profile that could be used for numerical work:

Lab 4 Materials Available

Note: the Lab materials are what we do in the lab. The Prep Package, which was posted earlier, needs to be done before lab and recorded in your lab notebook.
Lab 4 Plan of the Day
Lab 4 Materials
Self-assessment
On self assessment please record if you want to attend and will commit to open lab on Friday afternoon. I will begin designing a precision mount with those interested. Or play on the table with the optics.

Lab 3 - Proud

Paul, Julian, Cy and Daniel just after finishing their Lab 3 layout of a beam conditioner that reduces the laser beam divergence to less than 0.5 mrad and expands the beam 10x. Nice job guys!

Lab 4 Prep Package Available

Lab 4 Prep Package

Lab 3 - 5 October 2009

PDF's for Lab 3 are available:
Lab 3 - Plan of the Day
Lab 3 - Laser Beam Conditioning
Lab Self Assessment

Lab 3 Prep Package Available

Lab 3 Prep Package

Note that there is a video to view. It is one of the Feynmann New Zealand lectures on QED where he introduces his theory to a lay audience. The link for this 98-minute streaming video is

Feynmann video: Robb Memorial Lectures Part 1: Photons - Corpuscles of Light

Lab 2 - 30 September 2009

First off, how cool is the sign on our lab door?


(not the fire extinguisher part)

Lab 2's materials are at these links:

Lab 2A - Optical Table Fundamentals and Component Placement
Physics 492 Self-Assessmment

For convenient downloading you'll need a free Google account. Google is not evil, just demanding.

The class was about the table and putting components on it. We started by getting used to working in gloves with our tools and building up some simple mount bases, then placing them at assigned locations. We finished with full builds of several beam splitters from parts still in their wrappers. A quick design conference between the two teams divided up the table and reached agreements on where beamsplitters will go to provide beam distribution to three separate experiment areas. Here is one of the beam launchers at its assigned location, performing its function. Can you see a piece of Doug?

What, you may ask, is the white and blue stuff? The white is some lens tissue that came with the beamsplitter in its box being used as a compliant load-bearing surface for the beamsplitter to sit on. The tissue in turn is taped down with some small cut pieces of blue painter's tape to keep it from moving as the glass is placed. We don't want metal to touch glass if we can avoid it. Without the paper, the glass would sit right on the anodized aluminum shelf, and very high stresses would be developed at the three (why three?) contact points, leading to microscopic damage. But the paper is compliant - it deforms somewhat - so the load through the glass to the shelf is distributed over some area. It is easy enough to protect the glass in this way (this time!) and a good habit to always be thinking about how the glass is being touched. The beamsplitter cube is held in place by a nylon-tipped set screw threaded through the upper shelf which compresses it against the tissue paper. This set screw must be only snug and not turned down tightly - again to avoid possible damage to the glass.

The layout design conference was an exercise in parallel coordinated work by the two teams. We don't have time (nor inclination necessarily) for everyone to do everything. We need to do some parallel processing. In this case each of the two teams sent 2 representatives to the whiteboard to agree on how to divide the table up and arrange how beams would be delivered to several experiment areas with the beamsplitters. The result:


Lab 3 prep package will be up shortly. Part of the prep will be to watch one of Feynmann's videos. The video itself is over an hour long, so be sure to schedule some time for this. The video is online and streams to your computer like YouTube. Also there will be a narrative with questions for you to work related to the video.

Next week we'll take a little time exploring the concepts in the video and relate them to what is happening on the tabletop.

Michelson Interferometer

After the scheduled class time was over, some of us went over to another lab to take a look at a Michelson interferometer. This is an iPhone photo taken looking upstream at the fringes formed by this interferometer. Everyone was able to safely put their eye at this location and see the fringes for themselves. Safe because the source was an incandescent light with a narrowband filter and a diffusor screen - never look upstream at a laser. We had a lively discussion on how it is that "which-way" ambiguity having to do with the 2 arms of the interferometer and small tilts in the end-of-arm mirrors give rise to these fringes. For example, the presence of 7 fringes means that the two mirrors are misaligned by 7/2 wavelengths from ideal - each half wave gives one fringe - or by (7/2)*500nm = 3.5 microns.

Lab 2 Prep Package Available

Lab 2 Prep Package

Instructions: do the work in the package, recording in your lab notebook. Be prepared to verbally report out at the beginning of class Sep 30.

Lab 1 -- 28 September 2009

PDF's for the first lab session are available:

Lab 1A - Introduction to Physics 492 
Lab 1B - Lab Safety & Fundamentals
Lab Self-Assessment

A simple demo is on the table reproducing Young's double slit experiment. First the laser beam is expanded and collimated through 2 simple lenses to form planar wavefronts / straight rays. The expanded and collimated beam then passes through a glass slide with a double slit inked on it. Then the beam propagates to the end of the table where it illuminates a simple screen to show the classic interference pattern.




Photos taken with an iPhone in low light - handheld and with its autofocus algorithm trying to sharpen edges so they are a little blurry.

Physics 492 Course Description

PHYSICS 492: Advanced Optics Laboratory

Instructor:  David Van Buren

 

Course goals:  (1) gain hands-on experience with optical components and their behaviors; (2) learn your way around an optical table and laser source; (3)  become familiar with optical experiment design considerations; (4)  construct end-to-end optical systems from source to detector; (5) introduce fiber optics concepts; (6) demonstrate elementary quantum optics principles; (7) attain proficiency using online and downloadable tools for technical work.

 

Topics will be chosen from:

Safety and care in the optical laboratory
Behavior of basic optical components
Optical materials and mounts
Detectors, cameras, and image data
Optical experiment design tools
Environmental considerations for optics experiments
Optical tolerancing and performance error budgets
 
Beam expander demonstration
Young’s double slit experiment
Applied diffraction
Fiber optic demonstration
Quantum optics table-top apparatrus
Interferometry and fringe detection
Fourier optics demonstration
Wavefront sensing basic experiment

Prerequisites:  Curiosity and a desire to work in a laboratory setting.  Familiarity with introductory university optics. 

 

Instructor:  Dr. David Van Buren (PhD 1983 UC Berkeley) is an Architect for optical systems at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  He has worked on astronomical telescopes from an amateur-class 6-inch backyard telescope to NASA’s upcoming flagship 6-meter James Webb Space Telescope.  He has also worked on a range of optical interferometers from handheld demonstrators made with household items to the spaceborne SIM Lite, which will be used in the search for extrasolar earth-like planets.