Assembly of the High-Finesse Bowtie Cavity

Alignment and assembly took most of the last 3 days, but went surprisingly smoothly. Preliminary measurements (in-air) show a cavity linewidth of about 100 kHz and a finesse of 10,000, exactly in line with predictions for the mirrors we chose. (The FSR is 1.05 GHz) Since we’ll be trapping atoms at the beam intersection, we verified that the cavity beams are coplanar (to within the accuracy we can measure) by monitoring losses from a sharp tungsten tip on a 3-axis translation stage. After an overnight UV/ozone cleaning, we’ll break vacuum in the main chamber and install the cavity and the new “science” cell tomorrow.