Green 532nm laser

[swansont]

Ah, yes. Electrons exciting a phosphor. Unfortunately, tritium is a regulated material in the US, so I can't get one. (even though tritium exit signs are used here. Apparently it's a paperwork nightmare if one gets stolen)

[aswokei]

I live in the US and I acquired a traser via Ebay. I bought it from some store in Australia. I really wasn't expecting to get it because it's radioactive and it has to go through customs.

 

It spent about 2 weeks in Customs, but surely enough it came through. And the thing is pretty damn cool and I got it for like $10. Trust me, get one. They are the ultimate geek item to own.

[5614]

The beam is not visible in lighted conditions unless you look straight down the pen. YOu can see every single bit of dust in lighted conditoins though. In the dark you can see a very reasonable beam. I took up to a high hill and it shined a nice beam over town. To say the less, at night the beam is awesome. It shined on clouds when it was raining with a nice beam to them also. Every minutes air contaminat shows up in beam. To say the less, it is amazing

Yes, you seem to be focusing a lot on the range of the laser, however I'm more interested in it's mid-air visibility.

 

In normal lighted conditions you can't see it at all???

 

And in the dark you can see it a bit, like this:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/5a47/action/210a23c/

and not like this:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/5a47/action/20fb225/

 

Thanks.

[H2SO4]

you cant see the beam, but you can clearly see the dot much brighter than a red one in the day. A red one wont even shine on a house across the street on a bright day, where a green one can.

 

 

Aswokei, im not looking toward the pen, im looking in the direction the pen is pointing. Like when your aiming a rifle or something.

[H2SO4]

You can buy trasers for 20$ at unitednuclear.com that will ship in the us. What does TRASER stand for?

[aswokei]

Tritium laser. (Nope.. doesn't really make sense)

 

They do use tritium, but don't really have anything in common with lasers, except that they both produce light.

[H2SO4]

I gues it just a cool name.

[Severian]

I have access to a 10 Watt green laser' date=' but it's not portable.

[/quote']

 

We have a 10 Watt laser (not sure of the colour mind) downstairs and it fits in my hand.

 

Actually, I am looking for a green laser pointer which has a remote for powerpoint slides. Anyone seen a good one?

[drizzt]

a lil bit off topic here.

has anyone seen any specs on the new blueray lazer ?

i know its supposed to blow the standard dvd away in storage media capacity

and ive also heard they are having a hard time stabilizing the element that emits the blue lazer beam

 

o btw i guess i should not have said new because i dont really have enough knoledge about to say if it is new or not, please excuse my arrogance

[5614]

Here:

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/blu-ray.htm

Is some good stuff on blu-ray disks. I haven't heard any new news about them recently.

[aswokei]

I've heard rumors that PS3 is going to be using blu-ray.

[H2SO4]

Tonight we had some low clouds and i actualy hit the clouds with my laser. Amazing. I also tok apart a red laser, pretty amazingf succh a small diode can produce so much light.

[swansont]

I also tok apart a red laser, pretty amazingf succh a small diode can produce so much light.

 

 

The "wall plug efficiency" of laser diodes is pretty high, as is the gain in the lasing active region. For higher-power diodes you have to anti-reflection coat one of the facets otherwise it literally blows the end of the laser off (degradation of the AR coating leading to this is one of the causes of death for laser diodes). When it does, it still acts as a diode, just no round-trip gain, so there's a glow at whatever color the diodes gives.

 

There are even higher power diodes that are tapered so that the power density doesn't get too high, and these are basically single-pass devices. Used as lasers they don't tend to have narrow linewidths because they don't have round-trip amplification, but you can also use them as injection-locked amplifiers. The two black boxes halfway down the table on the right side in this picture house tapered amplifier diodes. 500 mW output each (~ 10-20 mW in)

[5614]

So what exactly does that whole table do?

[swansont]

So what exactly does that whole table do?

 

It feeds different frequencies of laser light to our atomic fountain.

 

The blue boxes are stabilized diode lasers that put out a few mW. One of them feeds the black box at the center on the near end, injection locking a 100 mW laser. This gets split up to injection lock the tapered amplifiers.

 

Along the way, some of the light passes through acousto-optic modulators, which bragg diffract the light off of a vibrating crystal, and shift the frequency of the light (by ~50-100 MHz, depending on the frequency that is fed into the crystal) The light eventually gets fed into optical fibers - you can see blue and yellow ones on the table - which gets sent to the laser trap.

[H2SO4]

wow, extreme.

[5614]

I just got one of these 5mW green lasers.... They're great! They might still be expensive compared to the red ones, but they are well worth it.

 

Main difference is that in daylight it works for quite a long distance, I had it about 6 houses down the road, after that it becamse fainter and you had to follow it to see where it was.

 

At dark you can actually see the beam especially if you look along the pen where it is pointing, it's not like a lightsaber, but it is there and very cool! Plus it stays brighter even at massive distances (compared to red) and infact its brighter 100% than my red one.

 

Basically its more powerful, brighter, goes further, you can see it in the air etc etc and I love it!