June 22, 2010

Today the Laser Teaching Center REU students had two presentations. The first was a tour of Dr. Schneble's BEC lab. His graduate student (Bryce Gadway) showed us around the set-up, which consisted of many laser beams and many laser beam paths that wound their way around the room, so needless to say we saw a lot of mirrors and lasers. I had never previously seen beams traveling over such large paths before reaching their targets. We were also able to see the gas cloud at an early stage of the cooling. Bryce showed us how they use two magnetic coils to move the cloud from one chamber to the next, where they do more cooling to form the condensate. He then attempted to make a BEC, but apparantly some of the lasers were misaligned, so we were not able to see anything. Still, I was not disappointed because just seeing all the intricacies of the experiment was very enlightening and awe-inspiring. The second presentation was from Ruzin Aganoglu, a graduate student working with Christiane Koch at the Free University in Berlin. The title was "Controlling the Photoassociation of Ultracold Molecules." Honestly, her talk was very confusing to me. All I could understand was that the University had an experiment running and she wrote a model for it that is supposed to be better than a previous model. I did not understand what the experiment was and it was even more confusing that the PhD's in the room kept pointing out her mistakes in the presentation. Obviously, they knew what she was talking about, but I had absolutely no knowledge about the subject, so I learned very little.

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