Experimental Atomic/Molecular/Optical physics with Professor Tom Weinacht "Our lab is an ultrafast laser lab with projects ranging from optics, to vacuum hardware, to software development. One recent undergraduate project in the lab was to build and test a white light interferometer for measuring the dispersion characteristics of mirrors for ultrafast laser applications (Doug Broege, B.S. 2003). This project involved using designing and building a Michelson interferometer, a HeNe laser to align the interferometer, a sodium lamp to set the arms of the interferometer equal and a spectrometer to resolve the interference fringes spectrally. Current possible projects include building a small vacuum chamber for storing sensitive hygroscopic equipment under roughing vacuum, building a Michelson interferometer to measure the surface displacement of a deformable mirror, writing computer code to interface with a CCD camera or control the operation of a precision stepper motor." October 2003