July 12th- Day 15

Just our luck.

Using the new software Alex showed us how to use on Friday, our goal was to minimize the spot size. We were shooting for a vertical spot size (FWHM) of either 8 or 9. He had everything aligned Friday and just had to move the z axis of the optic to try and further minimize the spot size. When we got there, we turned all the equipment on and started up the software. Our FWHM in y was 11.0. We went to move the actuator controlling axis z of the optic, but it did not want to go any further than 0.275mm in the positive direction. It had worked just fine Friday, but we did not want to force anything, so we went 1.0mm in the negative direction. We scanned axis 1 (rotation) and axis 4 (horizontal), but neither of the scans produced the desired results. We even 'went to home' with everything in between scans, so we shouls have at least gotten something. We moved the z axis actuator as far positive as it would go (0.25mm) and ran a scan. This should have produced somewhat better results because we proved the z axis needed to move further in the positive direction before we left on Friday. The FWHM was around 50. Then we notied axis 4, 5, and 6 all said they were at +8.0mm, but when we went to move them, they jumped back to 0.0mm after displaying '+Inf' and we have no idea what happened. After that the computer started running slower than normal and none of the actuators would move at all. Renee and I tried restarting the computer, but it was unsuccessful. We did not want to break anything so we called it a day and went back to the lab. We didn't do anything we hadn't done before, and hopefully Alex will know what to do.