Congratulations are in order for group member Jesse Evans, who successfully defended a Masters thesis on Construction of monolithic all-glass optical cavities for trapping ultracold atoms.

The novel optical assembly techniques he helped develop are going to allow us to build some rather special cavity-based dipole traps, such as the symmetric ring-bowtie depicted in the rendering above. That cavity will undergo final cleaning and installation in our 3DMOT chamber very soon. We’re waiting to break vacuum on the main chamber, since our custom fused silica “science cell” from Precision Glassblowing (rendering below) will be delivered next month, and we want to install them in one operation.