I figured it out, ‘cause it broke on me while I was in Pullman, Asilomar, San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle.

It’s because it shouldn’t be used for this experiment! The laser has been trying to tell me this by breaking all the time!

I need a good ol’ Titanium Sapphire system, not my Ytterbium based system… and we’ve got five or six of those kicking around the lab!

All I need is an electric field. With the large bandwidth of Ti:Saph, it would be easy to stretch the pulse out long enough to avoid unwanted nonlinearities and still remain in the impulsive limit to a shear wave. Plus, since the pump is at 800nm this has the added benefits of not being absorbed into either vibrational overtones or even via two photon absorption at 400nm. I would have to get THREE photon absorption to have the same problems I used to have with my laser’s green. Plus, I can access smaller grating spacings because the angles don’t need to be as big to get them.

Finally, these other systems seem to put out more energy than mine does!

No wonder! Shear waves and Nutella, here I come!