Related papers: The ALFA Laser: Beam Relay and Control System
We describe an optical bench in which we lock the relative frequencies or phases of a set of three lasers in order to use them in a cold atoms interferometry experiment. As a new feature, the same two lasers serve alternately to cool atoms…
Tunable lasers are essential for optical communication, spectroscopy, and precision sensing, where flexible and fast control of the laser wavelength is needed. However, conventional tunable laser systems often rely on mechanical actuation,…
The LOw FRequency ARray - LOFAR is a new radio telescope that is moving the science of radio pulsars and transients into a new phase. Its design places emphasis on digital hardware and flexible software instead of mechanical solutions.…
The integral field spectrograph configuration of the LMIRCam science camera within the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) facilitates 2 to 5 $\mu$m spectroscopy of directly imaged gas-giant exoplanets. The mode, dubbed ALES,…
We present measurements of high-order harmonics and relativistic electrons emitted into the vacuum from a plasma mirror driven by temporally-shaped ultra-intense laser waveforms, produced by collinearly combining the main laser field with…
Imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) used for ground-based gamma-ray astronomy at TeV energies use reflectors with areas on the order of 100m$^2$ as their primary optic. These tessellated reflectors comprise hundreds of mirror…
We present the performance of the upGREAT heterodyne array receivers on the SOFIA telescope after several years of operations. This instrument is a multi-pixel high resolution (R > 10^7) spectrometer for the Stratospheric Observatory for…
Maintaining stable and precise alignment of a laser beam is crucial in many optical setups. In this work, we present a microcontroller-based rapid auto-alignment system that detects and corrects for drifts in a laser beam trajectory using a…
A novel scheme is proposed to generate uniform relativistic electron layers for coherent Thomson backscattering. A few-cycle laser pulse is used to produce the electron layer from an ultra-thin solid foil. The key element of the new scheme…
Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets (``exoEarths'') with a coronagraph instrument on a space telescope requires a stable wavefront with optical path differences limited to tens of picometers RMS during exposure times of a few hours.…
Adaptive optics laser guide star systems perform atmospheric correction of stellar wavefronts in two parts: stellar tip-tilt and high-spatial-order laser-correction. The requirement of a sufficiently bright guide star in the field-of-view…
We describe a superconducting device capable of producing laser light in the visible range at half of the Josephson generation frequency with the optical phase of the light locked to the superconducting phase difference. It consists of two…
We describe the realization and characterization of a compact, autonomous fiber laser system that produces the optical frequencies required for laser cooling, trapping, manipulation, and detection of $^{87}$Rb atoms - a typical atomic…
Three dimensional laser beam steering has been demonstrated using a single optical device -a DMD micro-mirror array. Laser beam focus position is controlled using dynamically adjustable zone plates. These zone plates take the form of…
We describe the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, a robotic imaging system optimized for the detection of extended ultra low surface brightness structures. The array consists of eight Canon 400mm f/2.8 telephoto lenses coupled to eight…
Technology has advanced to the point that it is possible to image the entire sky every night and process the data in real time. The sky is hardly static: many interesting phenomena occur, including variable stationary objects such as stars…
Laser-plasma technology promises a drastic reduction of the size of high energy electron accelerators. It could make free electron lasers available to a broad scientific community, and push further the limits of electron accelerators for…
We discuss the baseline optical configuration for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, in which the lasers are not free-running, but rather one of them is used as the main frequency reference generator (the {\it master})…
The compactness of laser wakefield acceleration (LWFA) is limited by its long focal length for high power lasers, e.g., more than 10 meters for 1-peatawatt (PW) laser pulse and up to hundreds of meters for 10-100 PW lasers. The long focal…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), presently under construction, is a revolutionary astronomical interferometer, that will operate at (sub)millimeter wavelengths. With unprecedented sensitivity, resolution, and imaging…