We’ve finished installing the bowtie cavity in the 3DMOT chamber, and attached our new fused silica “science” cell made by Precision Glassblowing. The windows have a graded-index surface-relief AR coating, done by Tel Aztec, and it’s really strange to see no reflections, and none of the angle-dependent chromatic effects characteristic of multilayer thin film AR coatings.

Preliminary tests of coupling to the cavity in-vacuum show that it is aligned within the chamber as intended, and confirmed that the linewidth is <100 kHz. We’ve already been able to lock the laser to the cavity using only piezo feedback on the fiber laser, in spite of the excess vibrations from the pumping station temporarily attached to the chamber. Full characterization of the cavity will have to wait until after the bakeout.