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Undergraduate projects

Diode lasers are at the very heart of modern technology; they are used to weld cars measure distances accurately and… to make and manipulate Bose-Einstein Condensates!
There are two projects: a new type of diode laser and a novel type of spectroscopy

Construction and testing of a novel type of diode laser

A standard diode laser uses a grating to select the light that can resonate in the laser cavity: 

Unfortunately, in order to change the frequency of the laser, one has to move the grating, and this moves the output beam. One solution is to use a so-called transmission grating:

However, such gratings are often bulky and cannot easily be moved in order to tune the cavity. We therefore plan to use a fixed grating plus a movable mirror.

Laser stabilization and spectroscopy

For most experiments in our lab we need well-stabilized diode lasers. This can only be achieved by referencing them to an atomic transition using saturation spectroscopy. Usually one frequency modulates the laser in order to boost the rather weak signal. An interesting alternative would be to amplitude modulate the signal and observe the phase-shift due to the refractive index of the atoms. You would implement and test this technique using our existing diode lasers.

Interested?

If you are interested, you would work closely with Daniel and Melina. Please, feel also free to contact anyone in our team to get a feel, what it is like to work in the Cretan Matter-Waves Group.

And - if you are interested in joining us - contact Wolf von Klitzing.