Spectrum of Industrial and Scientific Lasers

The first laser ever made used a synthetic ruby crystal- a solid-state laser with an emission wavelength of 694 nanometers. 

Now, over 50 years later, lasers can be from solids, liquids, or gases. They span the electromagnetic spectrum from far-infrared to the edge of ultraviolet, and emit wavelengths from 3 micron to 157 nanometers.

The full diagram of commercial lasers here at Wikimedia Commons.

We made a new and revised chart from the data showing more specifically the industrial and scientific lasers used in micro-drilling applications.

click here to enlarge

From the description:

"Laser types with distinct laser lines are shown above 

the wavelength bar, while below are shown lasers 

that can emit in a wavelength range... the height of 

the line gives an indication of the maximal power/pulse 

energy commercially available. For the Ar+-Kr+ laser 

only the most important lines are labeled...

Currently most of the data is taken from Weber's book 

"Handbook of laser wavelengths", with newer data in 

particular for semiconductor lasers."

From the original, we switched the bar around to go from longer to shorter wavelengths, instead of the other way around. Otherwise, it's the same data. It gives a nice visual overview of the laser spectrum and their myriad types.

Next week I'll be writing about an exciting research paper from NOAA for which we made 3 key parts. It connects atmospheric research, WWII planes, Hurricane Katrina, UV-LEDs, and Lenox Laser orifices all together! So be sure to check back.

And as always, check out past posts and our company website for even more information.

www.lenoxlaser.com

Meet Thomas Young

THOMAS YOUNG

Thomas Young was an English polymath (a person with encyclopedic or varied knowledge or learning) who contributed to the scientific understanding of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology and Egyptology.. So great was his knowledge that he was called “Phenomena Young” by his fellow students at Cambridge.

Young was born in 1773, the eldest of 10 children. By the age of fourteen, he had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in North Central Ethiopia.

In 1792, Young began to study medicine in London. He later moved to Gottingen, where he obtained his doctorate in physics in 1796. A year later, in 1797, Young entered Emmanuel College at Cambridge. By 1799, Young had established himself as a physician in London where he published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation at a physician. It is to be noted that while studying medicine in London, he explained the mode by which the eye accommodates itself to vision at different distances as depending on change of the curvature of the crystalline lens. This was to prove valuable to him being the first to describe astigmatism.

In 1801, Thomas Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution in Cambridge. His initial interest in light and vision carried over to this new academic endeavor. Here, Young presented the hypothesis, later developed by Hermann von Helmholtz, that color perception depends upon the presence in the retina of three kinds of nerve fibers which respond respectively to red, green and violet light. This theory was experimentally proven in 1959, one hundred fifty eight years later!

While at Cambridge, Young performed his now famous double slit experiment where he passed a beam of light through two parallel slits in an opaque screen, forming a pattern of alternating light and dark bands on a white surface beyond which established that light was a transverse wave motion whose wavelength determined color (see wave interference). His findings were strongly opposed by contemporary scientists who believed that Newton, who had proposed that light was corpuscular in nature, would not possibly be wrong. However, Young’s work was soon confirmed by the French scientists, Fresnel and Arago.

In 1804, Young’s essay, “Cohesion of Fluids”, founded the theory of capillary phenomena on the principle of surface tension. He also observed the constancy of the angle of contact of a liquid surface with a solid, and showed how from these two principles to deduce the phenomena of capillary action (see Young-Laplace Equation and the Young-Dupre Equation). He went on to describe the characterization of elasticity that came to be known as Young’s Modulus.

After holding positions at St. George’s Hospital and on various scientific boards and committees, Thomas Young died in 1829 after a relatively short but distinguished career. His contemporary, Sir John Herschel, called him a “truly original genius”. Young being the first to define the term “energy” in the modern sense, was praised by Albert Einstein in his 1931 forward to an edition of Newton’s Opticks. Other admirers include physicist Lord Rayleigh and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson.

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Introduction to Young's Double-slit Experiment

Lenox Laser Young's Double Slit

The double slit experiment, thought to have been first performed by English scientist Thomas Young circa 1800, generally refers to an experiment in which light is allowed to diffract through slits which produces fringes, or wave-like interference patterns on an opposing screen.

A similar experiment was performed by Claus Jonsson of the University of Tubingen where beams of electrons showed similar interference patterns. The results of this experiment are often taken as evidence of the “wave-particle duality” predicted by quantum physics. (a.k.a. Englert-Greenberger duality)

In the case two pinholes are used instead of slits, as in the original Young’s experiment, hyperbolic fringes are observed. This is because the difference in paths traveled by the light from the two sources is a constant for a fringe which is the property of a hyperbola. If the two sources are placed on a line perpendicular to the screen, the shape of the interference fringes is circular as the individual paths traveled by light from the two sources are always equal for a given fringe.

It is little wonder that the experiment performed by Dr. Jonsson (Young’s Double Slit applied to the interference of single electrons) ranks first in the list of the top ten most beautiful experiments as chosen by the readers of Physics World magazine.

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