by Emily Collier

Supervisor:  Dr. Zenghu Chang

Graduate Students: He Wang, Yi Wu

First of all, welcome to my page and my project for the summer of '07. This site will tell you all you wanted to know and hopefully more about the production of attosecond laser pulses; the manner in which they could be produced, the techniques behind the optics, the ideas behind the techniques and some other fun physics information as well.

Here are some pictures of our set-up and lab group

Yi and Me	He and Me

Project Statement:

 During the summer of 2007, I spent approximately ten weeks studying and researching at Kansas State University Physics Department. My project during this time was to work with two graduate students to shape laser pulses. Specifically, we designed and set up a system that (hopefully) allows us to adjust each separate frequency of a laser light pulse. Using a device called an SLM, Spatial Light Modifier, we were able to apply different voltages to each pixel on a liquid crystal screen. Each pixel corresponds to a different frequency of light. When we apply the different voltages, we change the phase of each frequency, our goal is to make the phase of each frequency the same. Then applying a Fourier Transform we were able to see how this phase shift changed the time- dependence of the pulse. Our goal is to be able to control the pulse as we choose, thus making it possible to control the duration of each pulse. We are hoping to attain attosecond pulses through this method.

As a part of this research, I was also given the opportunity to learn many different styles of programming, including, C, C⁺⁺ ,and LabView. To many, these programs might seem basic, but I had not yet encountered them in my undergraduate studies, so this presented a new and interesting challenge for me. LabView especially proved to be quite the ordeal and I spent a good deal of time learning this program and attempting to write a program that would be useful to our experiment with it.

Motivation: Attosecond pulses could be used to study time-dependence of atomic dynamics. Greater control of pulse duration gives a better control of the power produced from each pulse as well.

Final Presentation:  Here you can look at my final presentation in PowerPoint (unfortunately this is missing some images since the file was too large) or  PDF (Here the file looks the way I intended with all the backgrounds and pictures...So look at this one)

Final Update 08-03-07