Emily A Kaplan edited Our_beam_had_a_power__.tex  over 8 years ago

Commit id: b6a3551fe0eb89b0cff17d3a37679edaf1dfc919

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Our beam had a power of 1 mW. It passed through the rubidium cell, which contained both rubidium 85 and rubidium 87, and hit a photodiode. The photodiode was connected to an SRS fast amplifier with a gain of 1250, which was connected to an oscilloscope from which we could collect data. To monitor the frequency of our light, we used a Bristol Wavemeter. Out attempt to use the wavemeter as a frequency calibration ultimately failed. The intent was to calibrate the time axis of our transmission graph with a frequency. Unfortunately the wavemeter was not stable enough across a single scan to do this, as can be seen in Figure~\ref{fig:FrequencyScan}. This stability instability  contributes an additional systematic error that was too time intensive to study for this experiment. We scanned the laser over a frequency range for each of the electronic transitions, tuning the central frequency of our scan to make sure that the absorption was happening in the middle of each scan. The absorption curve for Doppler spectroscopy is a convolution between a Gaussian and a Lorentzian, but we fit to a Gaussian for the reasons described in \textbf{section} . An example of our data fitted to a Gaussian is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:NegativeGaussian}.