I have been involved with a number of electronics projects in the Brown Lab, as well as a few in the Quantum Information Systems (QIS) Group. Two of these, as well as one of the projects I was in charge of at my internship with Arizona Chemical, are described below.
Voltage amplification boards
I worked with the QIS group at GTRI for a few weeks in the fall 2012 semester and built multiple 25 channel op-amp boards to give experimenters more precise control over individual DC electrodes in their traps. I built and tested the boards, where four will be integrated into a in high fidelity transport experiment, while another will be used in a different trap to help with compensation.
Tapered amplifier implementation
Having obtained plans from the Kuzmich Group at Georgia Tech, Rene Rugango and I built a structure to house a tapered amplifier (TA) and the optics necessary to seed it with the 729 nm laser in lab. I pieced together the structure, set up the temperature control system (using a thermoelectric cooler, TEC), and built an external fan control to keep the heat sync attached to the TEC cool while Rene set up the optics and aligned the seeding laser. At the most recent update (9/2013) the TA is able to amplify 14 mW to 205 mW (amplification of 14.6). The frequency of the light emitted from the TA is monitored by a WS7 and is the same as the light emitted from the seeding laser.
Hydrophilic-lipophilic balance testing
At Arizona Chemical, I created a procedure to test the hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) value of any polyamide used in the lab. At the end of my time at Arizona Chemical, this procedure was documented and made the standard for which any employee would find the HLB value of a polymer. Essentially, the scale ranges from 0 to 20 where 0 indicates a polymer that is soluble in water and 20 indicates a polymer that is soluble in a lipid. The procedure that I used to determine the HLB value started with mixing the polymer with two miscible liquids of known HLB value, one of which was high while the other was low. The miscible liquids were then mixed and the HLB value of that liquid was calculated before the polyamide was mixed with the new liquid. This process was repeated multiple times before the correct answer was converged upon. The picture shows that the HLB value of the Arizona Chemical polyamide WF1500V is 9.1.
