Index

Software tools for equipment and experiment control

Much of my time during the PhD was spent writing software. While the main product of a PhD is papers and the underlying ideas of the experiments carried out, software was often used to rigorously encode these more semantic or ephemeral results. Sometimes, the efficacy of a certain experimental idea depends greatly on the simplicity and reliability of the software used to implement it. If the setup of an initially complex experimental arrangement—for example, the synchronization of intensity modulators and arbitrary waveform generators with a mode-locked laser—can be made significantly simpler through the use of software, then the idea becomes more practical and more likely to be adopted by other researchers.

For these reasons, I include introductions to the software tools on which I spent the most time and gained the most benefit. Perhaps these repositories provide insight that the thesis so far has not.