New lab!

This summer, the physics building saw huge renovations/relocations to make it possible to move our research labs into the basement, where building vibrations are essentially negligeable. The relocation/renovation involved tearing down the walls between two classrooms and a small closet that housed my pulsed laser in the basement and turning that space into three, roughly equally spaced research labs for David, me, and the new hire (in case they need a lab); of moving the two bodies that are used in the anatomy courses from the basement to the fourth floor (including a full renovation/remodel of the new room on the fourth floor to make it more suitable for anatomy research, something that my colleague in exercise science really loved too!) and turning the now empty space in the basement into our new OPTIX playground (supported by an NSF grant) and our intermediate lab/physics lounge; of turning our intro teaching labs into two new classrooms; of turning the old intermediate and electronics labs into our new intro teaching labs; and lastly, of turning David's old lab into a new space for a colleague in biology and my old lab into the space for our new instrumentation specialist. Phew! As you can imagine, this was quite a project and took pretty much all summer. BUT, about a week or two before classes started up again we were all moved into our new labs, although there is still a lot of alignment and building up to do, of course. It is so worth it! Everything is so much more stable, which makes it really worth my time to build it up nicely, because it'll actually stay that way (gasp!). Very happy :).

Below are a few photos of the move and the almost completely finished new lab. Proud owner, me :).

Here's a photo of the old lab, for comparison. Most of my stuff was already boxed up and waiting to be moved.

The new space during construction. It's almost twice as large as my old lab, which allows me to have both the ultracold and the ultrafast equipment in the same space.

Moving my optics table down the stairs. I am so glad we had the experts take care of that because it's very heavy (1200 pounds). They attached it to the big pillar at the top of the stairs and slowly lowered it down. Even though, it barely fit around the corner.

After they installed the two big optics tables in my lab, Pepper was allowed to sniff out the new room, too. He approved of the floor!

And lastly, here are a few photos after most of the move was done. The panels in the back are now also painted, and there are a few more shelves and other small things, but essentially, this is how it looked a few days after the big move. New, shiny, and - most importantly - functional and stable!