Arrival of a new vacuum chamber
The Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) group, led by Prof. Rob Eason, will accept delivery of their new vacuum chamber next week. Once operational, this chamber will make the PLD Group fully functional in the ORC's temporary photonics lab village.
The new chamber is to fulfil a role as a fabrication facility for thick and multilayer designer planar waveguide structures made from garnet crystals. The groupâs sister chamber, which has been finishing a stint in the FAST-lab, will then join the new chamber in the temporary village to allow the PLD group to experiment with new materials separately.
The new chamber has been specifically designed to take advantage of the new trio of 266 nm Nd:YAG lasers. This new laser system will allow the group to achieve previous capability by combining the output from all three lasers, but it is also possible to use them separately on different targets. Using the lasers in this way will create a wide range of new opportunities for the group to explore, ranging from the simple convenience of being able to produce multilayer structures by swapping between targets, to the more challenging prospect of producing structures with custom dopant concentration profiles. It is anticipated that this equipment will allow the group to make new ground very quickly by fabricating custom designed planar waveguide structures that can take advantage of high-power diode-arrays.
Click here to find out more about the PLD group.