Hi everyone—my name is Hugh Hatcher. This week at LASP (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics) in Boulder, Colorado, I continued working with Dmitry Vorobiev and the rest of the team on our ongoing UV fiber-optics project.
This week we were able to resume testing on the UV Hollow-core fibers as the new pump for the vacuum chamber arrived on Monday. After installing the new pump we were able to reopen the vacuum chamber and install the new shims that we made last week to support the fiber at both the input and output end.
This week’s tests on the fibers were all about repeatability. In order to prove that our previous results had been accurate data we had to demonstrate that the fiber’s performance was not effected by any steps we took in order to measure it’s performance. The first proof we did was that we could consistently and properly do a peak-up (adjusting the position of the fiber on the lamp end to maximize light transmission) on the fiber. We did this by pumping the vacuum chamber up and down and repeatedly taking scans at the same pressure after performing a peak-up and were able to get almost the exact same results (in the 350nm-400nanometer range) each time proving our repeatability of the peak-up. Additionally, this week we were able to prove that the pump down process had no effect on the performance of the fiber. We did this by going through the same process as the peak-up repeatability tests however we obtained the exact same results throughout our measuring range of the fiber (50nm-400nm).
Outside of work I did a fun hike on the Flatirons of Boulder with my brother who visited me while he happened to be in town. Also, this weekend CJ and I went to the Shelby American Collection which was very exciting as there were a bunch of original Shleby’s as well as the GT40’s from the 1966 Le Mans.
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