Related papers: The ALFA Laser: Beam Relay and Control System
Advanced LIGO's present baseline design uses arm cavities with Gaussian light beams supported by spherical mirrors. Because Gaussian beams have large intensity gradients in regions of high intensity, they average poorly over fluctuating…
The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) is a new visible-wavelength testbed designed to advance the state of the art in wavefront control for high contrast imaging on large, segmented, ground-based telescopes. SEAL provides multiple options…
LISA is an array of three spacecraft flying in an approximately equilateral triangle configuration, which will be used as a low-frequency detector of gravitational waves. Recently a technique has been proposed for suppressing the phase…
Light, being massless, casts no shadow; under ordinary circumstances, photons pass right through each other unimpeded. Here, we demonstrate a laser beam acting like an object - the beam casts a shadow upon a surface when the beam is…
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a Large-Number-Small-Diameter radio telescope array currently with 42 individual antennas and 5 independent back-end science systems (2 imaging FX correlators and 3 time domain beam formers) located at the…
The generation of ultra-relativistic positron beams with short duration ($\tau_{e^+} \leq 30$ fs), small divergence ($\theta_{e^+} \simeq 3$ mrad), and high density ($n_{e^+} \simeq 10^{14} - 10^{15}$ cm$^{-3}$) from a fully optical setup…
We make an adaptation of laser modelling equations to describe the behavior of a phonon laser (saser). Our saser consists of an AlGaAs/GaAs double barrier heterostructure designed to generate an intense beam of transversal acoustic (TA)…
We report the use of the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to conduct polarimetric observations of the sky at 5 GHz. The ATCA is normally operated as an interferometer array, but these observations were conducted in a split array…
Focusing petawatt-level laser beams to a variety of spot sizes for different applications is expensive in cost, labor and space. In this paper, we propose a plasma lens to flexibly resize the laser beam by utilizing the laser self-focusing…
Once completed, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) will be the most powerful (sub)millimeter interferometer in terms of sensitivity, spatial resolution and imaging. This paper presents the capabilities of ALMA applied to the…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is an international effort to construct an instrument capable of matching the exquisite imaging properties of optical space telescopes at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. ALMA…
A method for active control of the spatial profile of a laser beam using adaptive thermal lensing is described. A segmented electrical heater was used to generate thermal gradients across a transmissive optical element, resulting in a…
We describe the design, construction, and characterization of the Band 9 heterodyne receivers (600-720 GHz) for the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA). The ALMA Band 9 receiver units ("cartridges"), which are installed in…
Random lasers (RLs) are intriguing devices with promising applications as light sources for imaging, sensing, super resolution spectral analysis or complex networks engineering. RLs can be obtained from optically pumped dyes, optical fibers…
This article investigates the stability of 'laser sail'-style spacecraft constructed from dielectric metasurfaces with areal densities $<$1g/m$^2$. We show that the microscopic optical forces exerted on a metasurface by a high power laser…
Emitting light towards on-demand directions is important for various optoelectronic applications, such as optical communication, displaying, and ranging. However, almost all existing directional emitters are assemblies of passive optical…
The French-Italian interferometric gravitational wave detector VIRGO is currently being commissioned. Its principal instrument is a Michelson laser interferometer with 3 km long optical cavities in the arms and a power-recycling mirror. The…
Wavefront aberrations are identified as a major limitation in quantum sensors. They are today the main contribution in the uncertainty budget of best cold atom interferometers based on two-photon laser beam splitters, and constitute an…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) combines large collecting area and location on a high dry site to provide it with unparalleled potential for sensitive millimeter/submillimeter spectral line observations. Its wide…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will operate as an AM/FM receiver for gravitational waves. For binary systems, the source location, orientation and orbital phase are encoded in the amplitude and frequency modulation. The same…