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Something silly to do with lasers
Take an erlinmeyer flask, fill it with laser-friendly liquid, fire some lasers into it and set it spinning. Oh, and give it a music track.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7tTuyjESwo
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Damn... Firewall at work blocks out all youtube.com links! I need to take a look at this when I get home. But even a static liquid can make some really cool effects.
I bought some fluorescein dye off E-bay a few years ago (thoroughly nasty stuff, mind you - don't want to spill any!) and found that a drop of it mixed with a quart of water makes a green DPSS beam turn yellow when it passes through the water! (Of course, the water otherwise looks completely clear...)
Adam
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Hey....
That was pretty cool. Who knew you could get lumina effects from a vortex in water? The music was interesting too - reminded me of "Riverdance"...
Wonder what it would look like with air bubbling up through it?
Adam
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Hmmm. Might have to try some kind of suspension moving at low speed too.
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fluorescein
I've found that the ink from a pink hiliter works really well - similar effect as fluorescein. Glows bright yellow with 532nm, and white with multi-line argon. When I singled-out the 457 line of the argon I got a bright purple glow.
I just pulled the ink insert out of the pen and soaked it in a small amount of water to steep out the ink. This concentrate can be highly diluted and get the same effect. Other colors work ok, but pink was by far the best!
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mixing dye and water with laser beams...
Pink highlighter ink, eh? Cool...
RE: the other colors you tried... did you try other highlighters, or other regular inks from marking pens?
I need to make some time this weekend to goof off with my lasers again!
Adam
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I only tried hiliter ink. I tried all the colors: blue, purple, yellow, orange and green. Yellow and orange worked pretty well but not as stunning as pink. I first noticed this effect when one of my greenies hit some hot pink fur and glowed bright orange.
There's another interesting effect that I noticed... the glowing volume of liquid changes color depending on the angle it's viewed from. The color variance is subtle, but I could detect a greenish tone when viewed from above - to yellow at 45 deg, to orange from the side! I'm not sure what's causing this but I suspect it may be related to the polarization of the incoming beam.
It would be interesting to see how different hiliter colors respond to different wavelengths. I would think a UV laser would work great.
I've heard that dye lasers require a very pure meduim, but I wonder if it's possible to make a dye laser work with hiliter ink? Even without a resonator, I was seeing what seemed to be a huge amount of the laser energy being converted to yellow/orange by the ink. At full concentration, all of the incoming light was being absorbed within the first 2 inches of liquid. It doesn't seem far from being able to produce a beam... I wonder if you'd see superradience at some power level??
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