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 expiremental idea depends greatly on the simplicity and reliability of the software used to implement it. If the setup of an initially complex expiremental arrangement — for example the synchronization of intensity modulators and arbitrary waveform generator 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.