Ben Plotkin-Swing

Ultracold Atoms and Quantum Gases

at the University of Washington

"Ooh, what a feeling, // When I'm hanging from the ceiling!"

Recently, there's been a change in our lab. Everyone now spends a portion of their day hanging from the ceiling. Have we gone insane with suffering? Have we become bats? No! Instead, we have Ben Plotkin-Swing, and his contribution of the lab hangboard, to thank.

Ben came to our lab after an undergrad at Swarthmore college, a school very prominent in physics department-based T-shirts. In fact, along with more impressive factoids like leading the nation in students continuing on to graduate school, Swarthmore also paves the way in physics T-shirts, scoring 1st in the recent US News and World Report rankings with 7.3 Physics department T-shirts per physics student. These T-shirts have been a hit in our lab, and though we still can't agree on the nature of the duckrabbit, the Operator of Necessity is now used in our calculations routinely.

Ben has been working on injection locking of blue diodes, on a Fabry-Perot cavity, and on helping out with the interferometer project setup. Constantly poring over the optical table, his back turned to the rest of the lab. Is it so that we can read the punchlines more easily?


Fiber Alignment
"I think I see something."