Green HeNe

[mrfloppy]

i think am going to gamble on this 2nd hand laser i found online untested...

its missing the key, thus untested...
i imagine i can hotwire it easily
but i thought ill ask here first


and if it works, anything cool and nerdy i can do with it besides adding to the pool of wavelengths?

https://imgur.com/GUtYPJA

[buffo]

Green HeNe laser tubes are something of a rare find. If it's not too expensive, and you've always wanted one, you might want to take the chance. But you might get skunked.

Also, keep in mind that the gain for green in a HeNe is very low (in fact, it's the lowest gain of any visible HeNe wavelength). A tube that makes 10 mw of red might only make .5 mw of green. So if this laser is in rough shape, it might not produce any green even though it still ionizes. And even if it's in good shape, you're not going to get a lot of green light out of it.

20+ years ago I bought a large green HeNe head off Ebay that had a tube that was roughly 26 inches long. It ionized just fine, but I couldn't ever get any output out of the damned thing. I finally sent it to Sam Goldwasser back around 2010 or so, and he played with it for several weeks, trying to get it to lase. After hours and hours of tinkering, he finally managed to get something like 600 microwatts of green out of the thing. I told him to keep it, and he would message me now and again saying that he had been messing around with it, but he never got any real usable light out of it despite all his efforts.

So, yeah, buyer beware I guess.

Adam

[jeejeedr]

and if it works, anything cool and nerdy i can do with it besides adding to the pool of wavelengths?

Charge a UPS and connect it to it. Then you have a retro laser pointer