JANUARY 1997 REPORT FOR

W. CHARLES SYMONS, III

The first priority for the month of December was the submission of the final abstract for the Pittsburgh Conference entitled NEAR-FIELD OPTICS APPLIED TO NEAR-INFRARED IMAGING. After submitting this abstract, attention was focused on the Nd:YAG pumped OPO laser system. Basically this consisted of carefully performing a complete alignment of both the Nd:YAG pump laser as well as the OPO laser. Once this alignment was completed, a wavelength check was performed utilizing polystyrene as a reference standard. At this time, however, while the laser did appear to scan over a wavelength range, the absorbance output did not correspond to the polystyrene reference standard. In order to alleviate this problem, a difficult and time consuming recalibration of the OPO crystals will probably be required.