We’ve made some major progress this week with the assembly, pump-down, and bake out of the new 2DMOT chamber for 6Li and 7Li.
There are no indications of leaks so far with the blanked-off chamber baking at 250 C. If things still look good tomorrow, we’ll we’ll heat most of the chamber (especially the appendages that will house the lithium vapor sources) to >400 C to drive hydrogen out of the chamber walls.
The temperature in the central part of our lab is now stable to within ±0.05 C.
It’s been a complicated and needlesly drawn out technical battle to get to this point. For comparison, here’s a plot of what the HVAC system was doing to the lab temperature shortly after it was commissioned, over a year ago. (Emerson/Liebert, you are permanently blacklisted as far as we’re concerned)
Needless to say it wasn’t easy to make progress getting the lasers stabilized in an environment like that. Now that we’ve got a proper laboratory to work in, we should be able to make a lot more progress in the next 12 months!
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Moving day finally came, and with it, a crane. First, the unloading of the crate with the new table. The new table sitting out in front of the physics building. The new lab, marked out with table locations There … Continue reading
