This week we opened up the RDL to understand its anatomy and got much more power out! All in all the laser gods were pleased!
As I open my eyes
Hold it, focus, hoping
Take me back to the light.” – Harry Styles
First, we took the dye jet pump apart, cleaned it up, and added new dye bit by bit to get 20% transmission. Then Dr. Chu showed us how to adjust the M1 mirror tilt, P1 focus, and M3 focus while optimizing the cavity at each adjustment! We ended up with 960 mW for bare cavity alignment! While cleaning all the mirrors Dr. Chu cleaned the bottom side of a compensation rhomb, talking about her experience how that usually ends up giving more power as the dye vapors (probably) deposit on the bottom side of the rhomb. As she said this and cleaned the rhomb we immediately saw a ~50mW increase in power, putting us at just above 1.01 W! On optimizing the cavity further we were able to get 1.03 W out of the bare cavity alignment!
Safe to say this week our happiness index correlated with our RDL power!
This week India (5th September) and China (10th September) celebrated Teacher’s Day!
Cheers to Dr. Chu for being an amazing teacher!
Happy Teacher’s Day to teachers worldwide!
Good students always inspire the teaching passions of professors! Congratulations to the lidar team!
It’s always important to keep the laser gods happy!!! Happy Teacher’s Day to all the wonderful educators out there.