Equipment
The Femtosecond Laser Lab has been built since 2004 and houses both commercial and custom-built equipment. The instruments below serve the lab’s research on coherent control, quantum computing, spatiotemporal control and thermal sensing; see research for the experiments that use them.
Major Equipment
- Femtosecond Laser System
- Ti:Sapphire oscillator and amplifier system generating sub-100 fs pulses. Used for ultrafast spectroscopy and coherent control experiments. The mode-locked Ti:Sapphire oscillator in the thermal lens and optical tweezers experiments is a Coherent Mira-900 (100 to 200 fs pulses, 730 to 900 nm tuning range, 76 MHz repetition rate), as described in the Compositional Analysis of Fragrance Accords Using Femtosecond Thermal Lens Spectroscopy and, for the 76 MHz rate, in the Comparative Study of Femtosecond and Conventional Optical Tweezers.
- NOPA Ring
- Non-collinear Optical Parametric Amplifier providing tunable ultrashort pulses across a broad spectral range. Used for femtosecond spectroscopy.
- Pulse Shaper
- Programmable spatial light modulator based pulse shaping setup. Used for coherent control of molecular dynamics and quantum information processing.
- Optical Trapping Setup
- Femtosecond laser based optical tweezers. Used to trap and manipulate microscopic particles and to study colloidal dynamics. The source is a Coherent Mira 900F Ti:Sapphire laser that switches between CW and pulsed operation at a 76 MHz repetition rate; a half-wave plate and polarizing beam splitter set the power, a beam expander fills the objective, and a quadrant photodiode records the trapped bead, as described in Comparative Study of Femtosecond and Conventional Optical Tweezers.
- Confocal Microscope
- High-resolution confocal fluorescence microscope. Used for multi-photon imaging of biological and material samples.
- Thermal Lens Spectrometer
- High-sensitivity photothermal spectroscopy system. Used for molecular recognition and quality assessment studies. The single-beam Z-scan uses the Mira-900 Ti:Sapphire oscillator at 350 mW average power. The dual-beam configuration uses an IMRA Femtolite Er-doped fiber laser (50 MHz repetition rate) giving a 1560 nm pump (300 fs, 10 mW) and a 780 nm probe (100 fs, 6 mW), with silicon photodiodes (Thorlabs PDA100A-EC) and a 600 MHz oscilloscope (LeCroy WaveRunner 64xi), as described in Compositional Analysis of Fragrance Accords Using Femtosecond Thermal Lens Spectroscopy.
Virtual Lab Setup
