Hi everyone—my name is Hugh Hatcher, and this week at LASP (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) in Boulder, Colorado, I continued working with Dmitry Vorobiev and the team on our UV fiber-optics experiment.
Throughout the week, CJ and I stayed focused on the main experimental procedures. We spent most of our time running tests on how optical fibers transmit UV light under vacuum. We prepared the fibers by cleaving them with a ruby knife—working to get consistently clean, flat end-faces (image attached)—then loaded them into the chamber, which we pumped down to around 3 × 10⁻⁶ torr. Once the system was stable, we aligned the fiber between a deuterium lamp and the monochromator and ran scans to collect transmission data.
This week we continued to have issues with the fiber under-performing (graph attached). At first we thought they were alignment issues so we tried multiple times to realign the fiber and then measure its performance. However, after moving it multiple times the performance only decreased so we realized their must have been a small fracture that had been growing each time we moved it. At this point we decided we would cut a new 4m piece of fiber and start the cut back over again however we changed our cut back method. Instead of cutting .2m off every time we would now cut the fiber into two 2m pieces measure the performance of those and then cut each into two 1m pieces totaling 4 1m pieces of fiber. We thought this would be the best course of action as each time we cut the fiber there is a small chance of it breaking so reducing the number of cutback although decreasing how manyu data points we get helps insure that we don’t fracture the fiber and impact it’s performance.
Next week, we plan to continue with cut-back testing with the new method and hopefully make some accurate measurements on fibers in good conditions. Although their were some setbacks this week I am excited to see if our new cut-back method will workout well.
Outside of the lab CJ and I were able to hit the gym and I got to leave for a quick vacation to Hawaii!
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