Presentations Home

This program is funded by the National Science Foundation through grant number PHY-1157044.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Presentation 1 - Nonlinear Optics: The Axicon

In this presentation we show the basic setup of our experiment with the axicon. We also show some analytical pictures of a laser beam after a lens and after an axicon as well as the program we used to analyze these images, Origin.

See a more accurate graph of a Gaussian Beam, using a HeNe with a better mode here.

Presentation 2 – Quantifying the Bessel Beam Part 1

In this presentation, I go through the steps of how I saved myself over 380, 000,000,000 years, literally. This is my program that I made in order to quantify a Bessel beam (produced by an axicon). Unfortunately, as my possible issues state, this program does only produce a local solution. Thus, we changed methods after this presentation was given.

Presentation 3 – Quantifying the Bessel Beam Part 2

This presentation shows how to account for noise in our Bessel beam quantification and gives a rough explanation of the new method we are using for the program, The Nelder Mead Method.

A better explanation of the Nelder Mead Method is given in the book Numerical Methods Using Matlab and see a modification in this paper by Russell Barton and John Ivey of Pennsylvania State University.

Presentation 4 – Difference Frequency Generation

This presentation gives an overview of the nonlinear process, difference frequency generation (DFG). I also describe the setup we used to produce DFG and the results we found.