Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!hp-pcd!hplsla!tomb
From: tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: Lasers
Message-ID: <5170024@hplsla.HP.COM>
Date: 16 Dec 88 23:00:51 GMT
References: <22739@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Organization: HP Lake Stevens, WA
Lines: 25

>...
>If you're talking about the same article I remember, it wasn't a
>CO2 laser, but a pulsed "organic dye" laser.  I don't remember the
>power it would put out, nor the wavelength (although I think I remember
>that the wavelength was tuneable within limits).  
>...
>-- 
>Mike Young
>Software Development Technologies, Inc., Sudbury MA       Tel: +1 508 443 5779
>Internet: mjy@sdti.sdti.com                 UUCP: {harvard,mit-eddie}!sdti!mjy
>----------

And I recall yet another (in Amateur Scientist) dealing with building
a really simple nitrogen laser that put out "broomstick sized pulses
of UV" or something like that.  It was simplicity itself: a large,
triangular piece of double-sided printed circuit board, with a spark
gap along the whole of one edge.  The details get fuzzy at this point,
but it was a single-pass laser, so no mirrors were used.  And it would
run (the author claimed, as I recall) in air -- though a 99+% nitrogen
atmosphere was better (?).

(So what do you _DO_ with broomstick-sized pulses of UV??)

Tom Bruhns
tomb%hplsla@hplabs.hp.com