Natalie Ion, senior at North Shore High School, is taking her final data points on her optically dense rubidium cell.  Optically dense – meaning the vapor pressure is so high that it doesn’t allow any light to pass when the laser is on resonance – all the light is scattered. For her project, she uses a microcontroller to change and control the temperature of a Rb cell.  Rubidium has a very low melting point and thus as you change the temperature you can get big increases in the vapor pressure. 

We need this in our optical beat experiments because we are limited by noise.  It can sometimes be difficult to separate the noise from the optical beats.  When we build in Natalie’s device it will be able to drastically increase the vapor pressure and significantly increase our signal in our data.  (more atoms means more signal, yo.) 

This has been the ideal project for a good high school student.  There is electronics, programming, machining, design, optics, and quantum mechanics.  Natalie did it all. 

Unfortunately, she is going to be a Boilermaker next year and not a Panther.  What kind of mascot is a Boilermaker?  “Ooo stay away from me, I’ll will be good at engineering”  HeHe.