Weekly Report


June 4, 2002


During this summer, I'm going to be able to stay on campus again to do research. This is thanks to the help of the AGEP program and Prof. Metcalf. During the summer period I'm thinking about starting a project that involves second harmonic generation of light in a non-linear media. So far, I've been reading about the theory behind second harmonic generation and all the different ways of how it is used in experiments.

June 20, 2002


I am back from a little 10 day trip to the motherland. Sadly the Internet facilities rate very poorly. I've been out of contact so I wasn't able to respond to the inquiries for more information that the vendors of the nonlinear crystal sent me. I had fun but time to get back to work.

June 27, 2002


I continue working on my Sum Frequency Generation (SFG) project. Which pretty much consist of mixing light in the infrared and green wavelengths inside a nonlinear crystal to produce blue or ultraviolet light. So far, I haven't done any experiments. I'm currently contacting vendors so they can advise me on the optimal material and process needed.

July 6, 2002


So far, there are two options for the continuation for my project. We could either try to do the SFG on a nonlinear crystal or we could use a novel approach that uses a nonlinear fiber. The pros of using this approach are that the confinement of the fields inherent in the fiber would boost the efficiency of the process by a 100 or even a 1000. Another benefit, is that the generated light after the nonlinear process is already fiber coupled. This is great for any project that requires this. After going through various journals and papers I found out that the research of nonlinear effects in a fiber reached its peak more than five years ago, at around 1995. Anyway, this approach remains more like a curiosity until more information can be gathered. As of today, I've been trying to contact various of the researchers that were involved with nonlinear effects in a fiber.

July 16, 2002


Last week we attended to Ben's masters thesis talk about "A diode laser system for the production of Meta-stable He in Rydberg states using Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage". The talk was very interesting. One part that I found really neat, was the technique that Ben used to stabilize the frequency of the laser that he was using as a central piece of his project. He used a Master-Slave setup which used a low power diode laser (slave) with a small line-width to injection-lock the higher power laser (master). Which really fascinated me is that this is going to be same approach that I'm going to use to lock the frequency of my infrared diode laser. However, instead of using a "slave" laser, we will use a fiber Bragg grating to send back the specific wavelength that were are are interested and lock the laser.

July 17, 2002


Yesterday Doug and myself had a nice talk with Prof. Metcalf regarding the reasons why Singlets and Triplets states came to be. It is fascinating how mathematical reasons help to define reality. How the sign change rule, extrapolates in allowed wave functions. Next time, Im going to ask him about how injection locking works.

July 25, 2002


This week we are presenting our summer reports with the rest of the REU students. I just finished my abstract and I submitted it to Dr. Noe. I also gave a copy of it to Nina at the AGEP office. Sadly I was not able to do a presentation of my summer research.

July 26, 2002


Today we did our presentations for the REU program. All the presentations went pretty well and most of them were very interesting. I specially liked the one given by the student that had worked with laser locking. Mostly because it looks like the approach that I could end up using to lock the infrared diode laser for my project.

July 31, 2002


This week Prof. Metcalf and his group went away to Boston for a conference/workshop in atomic physics. Since I am not going to be able to work on my main project I started working on coupling light from a "Metrologic Laser" into a fiber using a coupler. This is a skill that once I learn it will be useful anytime I have to work with fibers. Today I finally was able to get it working and I gotta said it was harder than I thought. The multimode fiber was relativily easy to do after Dr. Noe showed me the ropes. But the single mode one was a harder nut to crack. It took me around 5 hours to finally do it. Next task will be to measure what percentage of the light actually gets piped into the fiber.

Latonus@hotmail.com, Jose.Mawyin@osa.org
Stony Brook Laser Teaching Center
Last updated: 31 July 2002