2013 Photos of the Month

December
Magnet configuration containing several pairs of permanent ring magnets for the purpose of producing a uniform static magnetic field over a (~10 mm³) volume. This apparatus has recently been incorporated into one of the NV experimental setups for improved bulk measurements of external DC magnetic fields.

November
Scan of NV fluorescence, measured using a donut-shaped laser beam, in a high-purity diamond sample. By combining Gaussian and donut-shaped beams in a technique based on stimulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, it is possible to image and perform magnetometry with a spatial resolution of a few nanometers.

June
DAMOP 2013 was in Quebec City in Canada. We may have skipped out of the banquet a teensy bit early, but as it turned out, because of that we managed to catch a rather beautiful sunset.

May
New side-collection setup for performing high-sensitivity NV magnetic sensing. This second-generation design will improve upon initial demonstrations discussed in this paper.

March
4.7 tesla, horizontal-bore NMR/MRI instrument located in the Northwest Building and used for studies of spin physics, bioimaging, and brain science.

February
The astro-comb is working, calibrating the HARPS-N spectrograph at the Italian National Telescope, the TNG. Above is a spectrum showing an observation of the asteroid Vesta with the astro-comb used as a calibrator. The upper part of the figure is a colorized version of the raw spectrum from HARPS-N in which the individual filled circles are astro-comb calibration lines while the mostly solid vertical lines are the spectrum of the sun, reflected from Vesta. The lower section shows the spectrum converted to a a standard one dimensional plot of spectral intensity vs. wavelength with Vesta’s reflected solar spectrum on top and the astro-comb calibration spectrum below.

January
Chih-Hao crating up the green astro-comb to be shipped in January to the TNG telescope and HARPS-N spectrograph in the Canary Islands.