I have been working on a 3D printable design pattern for kinematic optical mounts. The goal is eventually to have a Cadquery script that can do this for arbitrary choice of optical element to be mounted.
aligning optical elements in a plane parallel to the incident light is a common task in optics but commercial mounts for this task are $200+ each. I have been working on some easy-to-manufacture flexure designs that can simplify this task:
rotating an optical element about an axis perpendicular to incident light is also a common task in optics. here is another easy-to-manufacture flexure design for this task:
narrow linewidth lasers are lasers with high spectral purity. They are essential for laser cooling and trapping of atoms, and useful for inferferometry. I am using the above theta flexure to align a grating in a Littrow configuration to stabilize the frequency of a diode laser. here is an early prototype that is very likely to change.
this laser can then be used within an interferometer for position encoding or vibration measurement; more work on this to come later.
some friends and I are attempting to make a more manufacturable version of Edwin Hwu's XYZ nanopositioner, with better electronics. the original paper uses carriages that are both expensive & difficult to acquire and the provided circuit is slow and noisy. here is a demo of a 1-axis stick/slip stage carrying ~5kg at 5mm/s with 250nm step size (open loop):
I've been redesigning several of the optomechanical components for my atom trap to make them more printable and more stable.
currently I'm having trouble designing a 3D-printable version of the laser that is stable enough for atom trapping on reasonable timelines.
progress on the laser microjet is going. Vineet and I have been working on the design for the alignment system; optical components have just arrived.
