I have been waiting 20 years to do this lab idea! Light is a wave! Wait, light is a Particle! What is sound? Is sound a wave? Is sound a particle? I love this! This lab has generated so many discussions!
This year thanks to our wonderful gift from Thorlabs and some nice AO deflectors from Intraaction, we have been able design this cool experiment. It takes two or more weeks to do and it is worth every moment! Though today’s class was a little intense. Definitely lots of confusion. It is so fun to sort it out.
- Lecture 1: Light diffracts off a compression wave in a crystal.
- Lecture 2: Photon + Phonon STICKY Collisions! Woo Hoo!
- Lab 0: Observe the behavior of the AOM with a laser.
- Lab 1: Measure the angle of the output of one of the orders of the AOM and determine the speed of sound in the crystal. This is done, they got 5400 m/s. But I suspect we will need to redo. The data seemed a little buggy in round one.
- Lecture 3: Understanding the Fabry-Perot Cavity! (THANK YOU THORLABS! WE LOVE YOU!)
- Lab 2: Measure the frequency shift of the laser light after the AOM and compare it to the modulation frequency.
- Lab 3: Redo everything and make it make sense.
We are somewhere between Lecture 3 and Lab 2. Its all due before Thanksgiving.
I took some nice data this morning before lab of the modulation frequency and it was good. 50 MHz just like driving voltage of the AOM! But it took a while. I always forget how tricky it is to align a FP-cavity from scratch. In my research lab, it is always just aligned, perfect, and you don’t have to think about it. hmmm. That just could be that my research students are awesome!
Here are a ton of pictures from this lab.
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