Things I cant explain

Jared likes soda but not sweets?

Alignment to MOT tapered amplifier gets misaligned by a large amount about once a week. I need to check power before and after for a long experiment to make sure the beams stayed the same power

Blow away beam not blowing all atoms away from F=2 state. There always seems to be some atoms there when I check that population.

In March 2014, the 50 Watt FORT laser had terrible lifetimes. There are some pictures that should be in the Z drive. Now, after buying the new FORT laser, May 2014, they look much more reasonable. wtf? The one thing I did differently was put the laser through a beam cube and aligned the cavity mirrors to maximize the linearly horizontal polarized light.

  -Possible explanation would be that there was a loose mirror in cavity??
  -Maybe I was leaving a laser on when I took the data in March??

Some of the data sets I take drift up or down in Signal strength as I scan the over a range of frequencies to move the standing wave.

Solution - The center frequency I pick do to scans is to give the best transfer at some minimum coupling power. For frequencies around the center, up to about 1 Mhz away, the transfer is still the same for this power.

But, if I scanned the same frequncy with a higher power coupling beam, not only would the transfer be less because of the high power, but the peak transfer would be at slightly different frequency because of the stark shift.

So as I scan over different frequencies for with the standing wave, I'm creating a spatially dependent stark shift across the atoms. So at some frequencies I could transfer more atoms, giving me an overall small signal.

Shim Current

When I change the Shim current by 1 amp, I see a different levels of contrast in the standing wave.