This thesis discusses an approach to excite potassium atoms to very highly excited states (Rydberg states), and then tune their energy levels to induce resonant collisions between atoms. Potassium gas is super-cooled to 1 mK and confined to a small volume in a magnetooptical trap. A 405 nm laser diode, electronically locked to a potassium vapor cell via Doppler free spectroscopy, excites these ...

An approach is developed to remove the interference of moisture from FTIR spectra. The arises two aspects: fluctuation on temperature HeNe laser and transient concentration in light - path an spectrometer. produces a systematic spectral shift between single-beam sample background spectra, which often makes subtraction method invalid removing moisture. Herein, Carbo similarity metric (the CAB va...

HeNe ring-laser gyros are standard sensors in inertial guidance; mirror reflectances now reach 99.9999%. Present research instruments have an area of ∼ 1 m2, a passive quality factor of > 1011, and a resolution of the frequency difference of counter-rotating optical beams approaching microhertz. In the Sagnac effect, this difference is proportional to the angular velocity. Present resolution is...

We describe the development, design, fabrication, and testing of an optical wire to assist in the surgical removal of small lesions during breast-conserving surgery. We modify a standard localization wire by adding a 200-μm optical fiber alongside it; the resulting optical wire fit through an 18 gauge needle for insertion in the breast. The optical wire is anchored in the lesion by a radiologis...

Light scattering is a widely used technique for probing the microarchitecture and interactions of biological materials and solutions. In this paper, we describe the use of this method in the study of articular cartilage. The experiments presented utilize small-angle static scattering of HeNe laser light (632.8 nm) from 40 microns thick samples of cartilage taken from the superficial zone of bab...

Surface plasmon resonance sensor is used to measure the variation of dielectric constant sample, but its sensitivity is limited to surrounding temperature fluctuation. We present a high sensitivity phase-based surface plasmon resonance sensor made by gold nano-cylinder array. This structure is not only to reduce thermal conduction by the non-continuous gold array, but also to enhance surface pl...