Eureka!
On the off chance that anybody is still looking for WMD's, here's a picture of the doomsday device (135K JPEG) in my lab, and another shot showing it connected to other infernal devices (171K JPEG). And here's the laser that powers it (170K JPEG). The pen in that picture is, um, eighty feet long, because it's a massively destructive laser. Yeah, that's the ticket...
OK, fine. It's not a doomsday weapon, it just looks like one. It's the custom vacuum chamber that will serve as the trap region for the experiments I'm setting up in my lab. Here's a picture of the whole vacuum apparatus (143K JPEG). From left to right: the big grey chamber is part of the atomic beam source (with a big turbopump on top), the long copper coil is a tapered electromagnet that's used to help slow the beam of atoms, and the shiny chamber at the end will contain the magneto-optical trap itself. The laser system is on the table behind the chamber at the right, with the diode laser hidden under the white box (which is made of foam packing material taped to a cardboard box-- we're all about high tech construction). Six laser beams (three pairs) will intersect at the center of the sphere, one pair passing through the center window and the one opposite it, and the other two pairs through the diagonal axes perpendicular to it.
If you'd like a better idea of the scale, here's a picture of my thesis student (139K JPEG) next to the apparatus, and again, from a different angle (220K JPEG). I took all of these with his digital camera, so the slight blurring of some of the images is entirely my fault.
The pictures are intended to illustrate the talk I'll be giving at a workshop in Canada in a few weeks, but the WMD-looking chamber is so cool that I needed to post pictures here.
Posted at 2:17 PM | link | follow-ups |