POSM was started with a simple goal: to give students a serious place to gain engineering experience. We wanted to create a community that was specifically made to give motivated undergraduates the opportunity to design, build, and test the cutting-edge hardware used in a plethora of modern engineering disciplines. We chose to focus on areas like radio frequency design, photonics, optomechanics, and quantum optics because although they sit at the center of state-of-the-art engineering research, most undergraduates will never get the chance to explore them meaningfully. This mission has shaped everything we have done so far, and after months of organizing, POSM is ready to begin turning this dream into hardware.
We are beyond excited to share that POSM has secured approximately $6,000 in private funding to support our first round of research and development work. This funding will allow us to begin purchasing the raw materials, manufacturing services, and equipment needed to bring our designs to life. We are beyond grateful to our donor Mehdi Hoorzad for this opportunity and would like to extend our deepest thank you to him. Additionally, we are equally as happy to share that we have secured a dedicated lab space to use for project development. We want to extend a sincere thank you to Professor McLeod at the University of Minnesota for allowing us to use a portion of his lab.
POSM is now preparing to enter its first major fabrication and testing phase. Our first goal is to build a fully functional modulation transfer spectroscopy lock. We chose this as our first goal for a variety of different reasons. The spectroscopy lock is not only a culmination of numerous different sub-projects spanning from theoretical physics work to welding, but it also represents a first step towards our main goal: a fully working Magneto-Optical Trap (MOT). Our current plan is to complete both the construction and the testing of the spectroscopy lock by the end of August '26. We will then be able to use the finished spectroscopy lock as a starting point for the construction of the MOT. We hope to have the MOT fully completed by the end of November '26. While our main focus currently remains on finishing the spectroscopy lock, we are already beginning to develop ideas for novel research we hope to perform with the MOT, and we are incredibly excited to share more as those plans take shape.
This first construction phase marks the true beginning of what POSM was created to become. The spectroscopy lock and the MOT are both ambitious projects that don’t come with blueprints, but these are exactly the kind of projects that give students the opportunity to grow into real engineers. We have no doubt that we will make mistakes, but we also have no doubt that we can fix and overcome them. With all of our preparations finally taking form, POSM is ready to take on these difficult projects with spirit. In the words of JFK, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Thank you for your continued support.
— POSM Team
