New laser pictures (third harmonic q-switched YAG and CO2)

[GooeyGus]

So here are a couple new toys I got this week. The first is a laser I bought from Laser_Ben.

I had to do some tinkering to get it working, but as far as I can tell it now works perfectly. There was a jumper in the PSU preventing it from using it's own 200Hz repetition rate, and this little jumper is not mentioned ANYWHERE in the manual.

It's diode pumped, AOM q-switched and rated at ~20uJ with a 4-7ns pulse. Average power is about 9mW but those peaks should be a couple kilowatts of power. I bought this laser to pump some laser dyes!!

It is 355nm and is totally invisible to the eye unless shined on a florescent surface, such as regular ol' printer paper. It contains two NLO crystals, and maybe sometime in the future I will experiment with pulling the second crystal out to get 532nm.

Anyway, enough blabbing, here are a couple pictures:



As you can see here, it leaks a tiny amount of scattered 532nm light.










And secondly, a little 16" CO2 laser! This laser looks like it was in the original packaging, and contained an insert that says: 15.3W @ 15mA and also lists the serial number, which matches the serial number on the tube itself. Oh and it also contains a date: 9-5-1998.... a little old but still in nice shape!

Basically, this laser looks brand new. Nice and clean.

I tested it with the tesla to make sure it was still gas intact, and everything looks great!









NOW I just need to find a power supply for this thing. At least now I know it needs 15mA... still no idea on tube voltage but I'm going to guess around 10-15kV or so.

Thanks for lookin'! I just had to show off my latest laser gear...

[Laser Ben]

Looks good, be very careful with that 355 though, it can be very harmful.

Ben

[krazer]

Great find with the Laser Export, those really are awesome lasers!

For a ton of information on them, check out this page (shameless plug)

It seems odd that yours is leaking green, it would definitely be a sign of some roughhousing. It would be trivial to realign the knife edge inside the laser that blocks the green beam (see afore mentioned pages for more info), or remove it all together to get copious amounts of green photons. I would love to see one of these lasers producing 266nm (well perhaps not literally see it...), good luck with that!

[GooeyGus]

Some VERY good info on your site there! The green leakage on my laser is rather minimal... The pics make it look brighter than it is.

How is the beam quality on yours? Mine has a nice rounnd Gaussian spot, but also has a bunch of crap around it. Not dirt on a lens or anything, it's like stray light from the crystal. Also, how can I know if my laser is making good power? I have a power meter which read about 9-10mW at 200Hz. You mentioned yours would prduce a flame ball when focused on black paper. I haven't tried focusing it yet, but it didn't do anything on white paper. I'm not really into burning stuff for fun, I just want to see some evidence of the kW's contained in those pulses!