The view from the labratory door. This is what we walk through to get to work. It is also why I work nights: some of our more delicate stuff can't be done during the day while they are driving trucks around and moving these all the time just a few feet from our equipment.

Our entrance hallway: You have to put these on if you are going into the clean room where all of the big stuff is. Booties for shoes help keep dirt out so the mirrors (which can be up to $100,000 each!) don't get ruined, and the cool glasses protect your eyes in case a stray laser beam is bouncing around.

This area is okay without the laser glasses and booties, but you have to be careful not to run anyone over. We have a long skinny lab, and there are lots of people, so we get nice and comfy.

The disaster of an electronics bench where I've been doing some of my wiring projects.

This is the control room, where I sit late at night with my mentor and other people, trying to figure out how to "Lock the Interferometer", which basically means: How the heck to we get this huge piece of equipment ready to be used??? Since this is one of the most precise measuring devices in the world, it is pretty complicated, so it's not all that easy to get it ready to go.

Now we are inside the clean room. (They joked that if it's a smoggy day, we should all come in here, because the air is very clean relative to the outside world.) This is one of the beam tubes that holds the laser light bouncing back and forth. In our lab, the tubes are 40m long. At the actual sites, they are 4km long. This means that when everything is working properly, we can measure distances better than 1/1000th the diameter of a proton!

This is the ion vacuum pump that keeps our beam tubes in vacuum. At the big sites with the 4km tubes, we have what is probably the largest vacuum envelope in the world. You can also see here a screen, which tells us that there are no atoms or elements on the inside other than Hydrogen and Water. That's a pretty hard core vacuum!

These big chambers on the ends of the tubes hold the mirrors, and other optics. We will get to see inside of them at the end of July, when we install some new hardware!

This is the "Pre-Stabilized Laser". Again, since we need it to be in order to take our data, this (and even more so the ones at the sites) is one of the most stable lasers in the world, since we give it feedback to steady its frequency and its amplitude.

This is a new thing that is being tried out: Squeezing the quantum vacuum so that we have less noise in our measurements, so we can have better data. Our measuring devices are so good that we are now limited by quantum noise (which means they have done a really good job of getting rid of everything else), so now we are trying to get even that to go down.

This is one of the many, many imbedded computers with Data Acquisition hardware, so that we can figure out what the laser light is telling us, and we can give it feedback to keep everything under control.

This is the Mike Zucker Antique Electronics Cabinet. Apparently Mike used to work here, and he very carefully organized and labeled all of the bits and pieces of spare electronics. It's almost a little bit scary how well everything is organized in here.

My projects! This is a low-pass filter that I made. It is a first generation thing. After I put it together, we realized we needed it to have a little more to it.

The second generation filter. This one still low-passes, but it also has a notch. This should be installed in the next few days next to one of those imbedded computers.

This is the wiring that I put together for this little laser (the laser itself is the little gold box inside the blue box). Apparently they've never had a reliable test as to whether or not some of their sensors are broken. If things didn't work, then they were probably broken. Now they have something that will tell them for sure.

The little white thing is the end of a fiber optic cable coming from the little gold box, and shooting out the laser light. I have it going through a lens to focus it, and then bouncing off a mirror so I can tell it exactly where I want it to go.

This is me getting ready to take some measurements with the laser. The big black box is just a case to help keep dust off of more of the (less expensive) mirrors and lenses.

You can see in the bottom corner my mounted laser, ready to shine into the big photodiode box, to discover its "normal" state, so that we will have something to compare with if we ever think its broken.

This is a random cat that walks freely through the dorms. Maybe it set off the fire alarm that woke me up this morning?

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