Some pictures of my flashlamp pumped Rhodamine 6G dye LASER!

[femtoman]

for more info goto : http://www.swissrocketman.fr/laser-a...la,fr,3,54.cfm

[danielbriggs]

Amazing work.
And an absolute pleasure to have you here on this community.

Keep it up!

[planters]

And an absolute pleasure to have you here on this community.

Agreed. Don't you just love that color?

So few people still work with these, but I think they don't know what they are missing.

[Draco]

I realy wish i had to resources to attempt that, very very cool stuff

[planters]

I realy wish i had to resources to attempt that, very very cool stuff

You are nearly there if you have a powerful flashlamp. These lasers are really, really easy. The gain is so high that the optics can be of low quality and the alignment can be easily eyeballed to get threshold. The dye is cheap. RG6 is about the cheapest there is and nearly the best anyway. 50;50 methanol water is probably the best solvent (I've actually tried just about every option). Methanol can be ordered from eBay for about the cost of pharmacy isopropyl and works better. Use a magnetically coupled nylon housing pump; most marine aquarium pumps fit this description.

You are nearly there with your flashlamp build. Once that runs well where do you go? This laser is no more complicated. The image posted above by Arnold is within your reach. 2.5J is not difficult at all and it is incredibly bright. It will fill a room with a blinding flash of yellow/orange color.

The path from there is exciting. The optics in that laser above are almost certainly plano plano and these produce a good output, but if you want you can improve on this enormously and this can be a future modification when you are ready. More power is also easy. A lot more power is not very difficult.

Keep going and post when your ready.