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There are UV laser diodes, absolutely. UV can be more dangerous than IR, but in different ways. It's still dangerous to your retinas etc, but shorter wavelength light such as blue, violet and UV is more energetic, meaning each photon carries more energy than if the light were longer wavelength. If you were to take a 1W red laser and a 1W blue laser and compare them you'd find that at 1W the blue laser is emitting fewer photons than the red laser, but the photons are more energetic.
Short wavelength light is less discriminating about what it destroys through heating. With red lasers, dark substances burn much more easily than light colored substances. The same is true with violet, but violet will ALSO burn many lighter colored objects that the same amount of power in red would not.
As you get into even shorter wavelengths deeper in the UV range, thought to begin below 325nm or so, there is a skin cancer risk with direct exposure.
Short wavelength light is less discriminating about what it destroys through heating. With red lasers, dark substances burn much more easily than light colored substances. The same is true with violet, but violet will ALSO burn many lighter colored objects that the same amount of power in red would not.
As you get into even shorter wavelengths deeper in the UV range, thought to begin below 325nm or so, there is a skin cancer risk with direct exposure.
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