Nathan Harkema Email & Phone Number

Herndon, Virginia, United States

• Built a frequency-locked Er:YAG laser for a methane and water vapor lidar program. Worked through several challenges related to the low gain and high saturation fluence of the Er:YAG material. Delivered the laser to.
• Developed a program to control PDH-locking of the Er:YAG laser using a Moku:Pro CloudCompile program. I taught myself how to write and compile the VHDL code.
• Principal investigator (PI) for a NASA Phase I SBIR. I developed a design for the laser, simulated the performance, and I am building a prototype of the laser in the lab.

Herndon, Virginia, United States

Designing and building solid-state lasers for airborne and space-based lidar systems.

Tucson, Arizona

• Developed new spectroscopic techniques for studying ultrafast electron dynamics using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) four-wave mixing.
• Designed and built laser beamlines for two- and three-pulse experiments.
• Designed a system to stabilize the time delay between two laser pulses by measuring the position of optical interference fringes from a CW laser. Built a LabVIEW program to process images from a camera and control a.
• Resolved several problems with the performance of my lab’s optical parametric amplifier (a device which converts laser pulses to a different frequency). Developed a new set of procedures to align and troubleshoot the.
• Presented results of experiments at two major conferences

Grand Rapids, Michigan

Ran physics simulations for non-sequential double ionization of atoms in intense laser fields with Dr. Stanley Haan. Simulations were done in Fortran and data analysis was done in Wolfram Mathematica.

Ph.D. In Physics, Physics

Dissertation title: "Probing electron dynamics with ultrafast extreme ultraviolet transient absorption and four-wave mixing spectroscopies"

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Physics