After several months of planning the design for our state-of-the-art quantum optics lab is finally ready and construction will begin soon!
The 900sqft laboratory, ocated in the basement of the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building, will feature 120sqft of actively vibration-damped optical table space. To facilitate even higher precision, the lab will feature a two-zone temperature control system with the room being stabilized to ±1K and the laminar-flow optical table enclosures to ±0.1K.
The facility will host a widely-tunable continuous wave Ti:Sapphire ring laser (Sirah Matisse C) with sum and difference frequency mixing unit (515-2300nm, Sirah Mixtrain 19), and a 80MHz mode-locked Ti:Sapphire picosecond laser (Spectra-Physics Tsunami). All lasers can be actively frequency stabilized to a multichannel wavelength meter (Highfinesse WS8-30).
The lasers will be used as excitation sources for a cryogenic magneto-optical scanning confocal microscope designed around a 1.6K closed-cycle cryostat with 9T superconducting magnet (attocube attoDRY2100). The system will feature a high-numerical aperture cryogenic microscope objective for highly-efficient light extraction and resistively-encoded xyz nanopositioners with sub-nm resolution. Alternatively, two home-built room-temperature scanning confocal microscopes, featuring high-numerical aperture oil immersion or a variety of air objective lenses can be used.
For detection, multiple single photon avalanche photodiodes for the visible and infrared range are available individually or in interferometric configurations for photon correlation measurements. Alternatively, a high-resolution 750mm dual-exit spectrometer with 600, 1200, and 1800G/mm diffraction gratings (Teledyne Princeton HRS-750) and thermoelectrically-cooled super deep depletion backside illuminated CCD camera (Teledyne Princeton Blaze-400HR) can be used for spectroscopy.