Louis Baum

Bose-Einstein Condensation lab, Physics undergraduate student '13.

lbaum2 <at> u.rochester.edu

Louis is a physics and math double major from Delaware. He joined the CAT group during his junior year at UR, funded by a Research & Innovation Grant from the University of Rochester. Louis built external cavity diode lasers that use interference filters instead of diffraction gratings - a design new to our group. His lasers will be implemented in the BEC Lab for a new non-destructive imaging technique, and in the Ultracold Polar Molecule Lab for optical pumping of NaCs to its absolute ground state.

Louis endured many "character-building" activities in the lab as part of this project, and his work culminated in a senior thesis, "Construction and Characterization of an Interference-Filter-Stabilized External-Cavity Diode Laser" [pdf]. He won the Physics Department's Stoddard Best Thesis Prize for this work.

Louis was an NSF-REU fellow in 2011 at the University of Michigan in nuclear physics, and in 2012 at UCLA in condensed matter physics. He will begin a PhD in physics at Harvard University in fall 2013, and (correctly) intends to stay in atomic physics. Congrats, Louis!

UR Undergraduate Research Exposition 2013