For those of us who grew up in the 90's.
So, I have landed in the research group I am going to be in for the next 4ish years. I just got a desk in the office of the research team. They even gave me my own computer!
The physics I do is atom cooling with lasers. Here is the basic concept:
Using the Doppler effect, we can shoot atoms with laser light that will only hit the atoms that are moving in the direction opposite the photons.
It's like you are running around and you keep getting hit in the chest with pillows. Eventually you will start to slow down.
This cools the atoms down so much that they almost stop moving. Once this happens, we can see some pretty interesting quantum effects. One of them is scale invariance. This means that our little cloud of atoms in the lab will behave the same way as a black hole or a neutron star, the size doesn't matter.
If you click on the link, you can see some pictures of the lab.
Lab website. (My picture is under the people tab.)
My job in the lab right now is basically to lock the laser to different frequencies and then pipe it into the vacuum chamber with fiber optics.
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