Michael Tripepi is an assistant professor of physics. His research focuses on lasers. Jacob Beckwith | Collegian
What first interested you about lasers?
It was a combination of research projects that I had done as an undergraduate student. I had three different internships and through those I started working with lasers more and more and found that I really enjoyed working with them.
How often are students in the new laser lab?
We have students in here usually twice a week. We go over the basics of how to work with lasers and some of the background and optics needed for using them. The goal is over the summer to start getting some optical setups put together in the lab, which is just an arrangement of lenses and mirrors put together to use with the laser.
Do you have plans to melt or shape objects using lasers? What would that look like?
It would just look like a laser at one end of the table focused on a sample. We would just expose the sample for some period of time, like a second, and then see if it forms a crater. We’ve got an atomic force microscope and a scanning electron microscope, which will give us the features of that crater and that tells us information about how the laser is actually damaging the sample.
How long have lasers been around?
Lasers have been around since the ’60s, but they are still pretty expensive. It’s also not easy to get specialization in lasers because it requires a lot of background knowledge. And with optics in general you just need a lot of resources put together to make it work.
What’s a cool feature of the laser lab?
The table is an air suspension table which dampens all vibrations. Some of the optical experiments you may want to do require that the laser be very precisely positioned, and if, say, someone’s running down the hallway, the table would dampen that vibration. The air suspension allows you to isolate that experiment from what’s going on around it.
When did you first work with lasers?
My first research internship with lasers was 2015 when I did an internship with the University of Maryland. We did some experiments on the photoelectric effect, where we tried to produce electrons by shining light onto them. I had to take a UV laser and try to shine it onto a material and start measuring how many electrons were produced from that.
What are your plans for the lab in the near future?
The hope is to have students come in over the summer and help with putting together some optics setups. That would allow us to focus the laser on materials, start damaging them, and then looking at them under microscopes. There are also a few other infrastructure things for the lab I still need to get like a covering for the table to prevent dust or damage from a pipe bursting.
How much does the main laser you are working with cost?
It was a little over $8,000. There is also the laser optics equipment, which includes filters and lenses. Some of that I was able to inherit from Dr. Hayes from when he had a quantum optics lab. The thing with optics is that there’s a lot of different specialized components and so it can be a little bit overwhelming if you’re not used to all the different kinds of supplies at your disposal.
What do most people not realize about lasers?
They are everywhere. Lasers are used in not only DVDs and CDs, but also fiber optic internet, and different types of measurement and tracking. So even though they may be under the hood with a lot of things, lasers are very common now in modern society.
