Today I worked on updating my progress report and abstract. Posted to the SVN.
Our machined parts were finished by the machine shop. I picked them up, and Tara and I washed them in a sonicator for an hour to get the oil and metal shavings off. I tried assembling things to see how things look. It seems like the laser diode mount will have enough adjustability with the diode that we will not need to have vertical adjustment ability on the grating mount. We will need to make modifications on the plate with the D-sub and BNC holes because we will need 2 D-sub connectors, and there needs to be a better way to mount the male-to-solder connectors on the plate so they don't move.
I went to Rana's electronics talk. I'm trying to get LISO on my own computer but encountering some problems with Linux.
Tara found a 1/4-80 screw from a mirror mount to put into the grating mount. It was long enough that we'll have adjustability. We may need to get springs to put in the grating mount slit to offset the force from the screw.
Tara and I took apart a 5 mm focal length lens from a fiber optic and added it to our temporary setup from yesterday to test if a shorter focal length lens helps with collimating the beam. It works very well - we can get the beam to be essentially parallel at up to at least 50 cm with the right adjustments.
I put together a shopping list tonight of things we need to get checking Thorlabs and Newport:
PZT:
- http://www.physikinstrumente.com/en/products/prdetail.php?sortnr=100800 - price requires quote, but Tara referred me to this website.
- http://www.thorlabs.us/thorproduct.cfm?partnumber=AE0203D04F - Thorlabs has a product, $72.80, seems like it would also serve our purposes but I don't know which manufacturer is preferred for PZTs.
- Newport doesn't have anything that would fit in our setup
Optical window:
Collimating lens:
Collimating lens mount: I can't seem to find a good lens mount that can hold such a small lens, offers adjustability in enough directions so we can focus the beam, and is at the right optic height for our setup (1 inch). Thorlabs can't deal with such small lenses. I found something fixed from Newport that we could use if we figure out how to focus the beam in advance ( http://search.newport.com/?x2=sku&q2=LH-0.25). I like this mount ( http://search.newport.com/?q=*&x2=sku&q2=LFM-1A) although it is about 3 mm too tall, but there's not really an adapter to hold a lens our size. I could maybe design something with a similar idea to this mount? Not sure until I discuss with Tara...
I'll try looking again tomorrow to see if I have better success with the collimating lens mount. Will try to put TEC on the box.
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