Laser Laboratory Beam Alignment Skills: Course Package

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive tutorial and assessment package designed to teach essential and advanced optical alignment skills to students with no prior experience, suitable for upper-level undergraduates and new graduate students in optical labs.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed, step-by-step tutorial package with assessments and instructor guides to standardize optical alignment training for beginners in laboratory settings.

Findings

Effective in teaching fundamental optical skills

Facilitates independent student learning

Provides a complete resource for instructors

Abstract

A series of tutorials, assessments, and instructor guides are presented as a complete package for an upper-level undergraduate, or lower-level graduate, laboratory-based course, or extended new-student seminar. The purpose of this package is to teach the students essential skills beneficial for working in an experimental optical laboratory by introducing them to fundamental laboratory skills, and advanced optical alignment techniques. It is assumed that the students do not have any prior optical laboratory training or experience and the tutorials are written using detailed step-by-step instructions for the students to follow independently without the need for continual instructor guidance. The tutorials are intended to establish a common fundamental knowledge base and set of optical alignment skills within the group of students taking the course. Two examples of the target student groups for this package are: (1) an upper-level undergraduate optics course with a laboratory component (i.e., an undergraduate institution similar to Cal Poly), or (2) a cohort of new graduate students to an experimental optical program whose undergraduate backgrounds can span anything from no experimental optical experience to extensive experimental optical experience (i.e., an experimental R1 doctoral university similar to the Institut f\"ur Angewandte Physik at the Universit\"at Bonn). The accompanying assessments and instructor guides for each tutorial are provided in this package for the convenience of the course instructor(s) to use in the course as-is, or to use for their own reference of what skills to assess and how to tell if the student did the tasks correctly.