Brian Daly

Prior to arriving at Vassar, Brian Daly received the PhD. in Physics from Brown University and worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He has been a member of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Vassar College since 2005. He is co-author of 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, and regularly presents his research at international conferences in physics and optics.

The Lab

The Vassar Ultrafast Optics Lab is located in the basement of Sanders Physics.  It houses a lot of neat stuff, the fanciest of which is a Coherent Mira titanium sapphire laser that  produces laser pulses that are less than a picosecond (one millionth of a millionth of a second) in duration.  We use these ultrashort pulses to study very fast thermal and mechanical behavior in thin films, crystals, and nanostructured materials.

URSI Laser Project, 2015

Sushant Mahat ’16 and Molly James ’17 – Aligning the Optics

Brian Daly

The ultrafast laser experiment in the basement of Sanders Physics. My hand is not in the beam…