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Re: Optics Table



You might want to try www.thorlabs.com they are just down the raod from
our school, and have proven to be of invaluable help to me in setting up
optics equipment and experiments. Their equipment is also highly
regarded.

Peter Schoch

Hugh Haskell wrote:

At 8:20 -0400 8/4/01, Richard Bowman wrote:

We are in a position to specify an optics table in a grant proposal for
educational scientific equipment. Does anyone have suggestions of brand
and type? We are interested in something that minimizes vibrations so that
holography can be done in undergraduate labs, but the table will also be
used in an upper level experimental physics course and for senior
projects.

Oriel and Melles-Griot both sell very good vibration-isolated optical
tables, but they are expensive, starting at around $10K and
escalating rapidly. I don't have their addresses since my catalogs
are at school, but I'm sure you can find them on the web with little
or no effort. Since most buildings have low-frequency vibrations
(swaying) that are difficult for even the best vibration-isolation
systems to eliminate, it is best to create any optics labs that
require vibration isolation on or near the ground floor of the
building. Machinery vibration and the vibration induced by passing
trucks is much easier to isolate. Also be sure that you have filters
for the lighting system that pass only green light (there are several
thatrical gels that are suitable), since the film most commonly used
for holography is sensitive to red light.

Not surprisingly, holography is as much an art as it is science, and
experience is by far the best teacher of the techniques. If the
students will not have much time to learn the ins-and-outs of
holography while doing their projects, it is really important that
the lab staff have developed a reliable set of instructions for them
to follow. To do otherwise is to pretty much guarantee that the
projects will fail. They may anyway.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

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