Playing around

I was 'testing' my red gas Spectra-Physics 60 and thought I'd fire my green laser in the semi-polished end.
Whats it now a yellow semi-gas laser?

So you're claiming a gas/semi conductor hybrid! :thinking: (Cool, may I add!!!)

Good stuff! Nothing wrong with that! I haven't seen one of those at all! The setup looks kind of weird. Whar's the tube next to the HeNe one?

Nice work! Any more photos of the dot/beam? What are the outputs?

I can see a yellow, He/Ne/diode pionter build in the offing!

M

That was my first tube and the smaller tube attached is the flash tube with the mirrored ends.

It has a 10 ohm resistor and a Plasma Power supply. That pulls around 500mW when powered so my best guess is the tube output maybe in the 350-450 mW range.

I need to build a nice kit to hold it and protect it, but I've had in a shoebox for 25 years! However, that will change since I've been here!!

Here are a few more shots.

Welcome to multilayer dichroic optics..

Steve

onion said:

output maybe in the 350-450 mW range.

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thats a hene... its probably putting out *maybe* 5mW

yea, its like 30 years old.

ya they are cool though... henes are special

but ya a 350mW hene would be like a mile long lol

In that case I gots a 350mW HeNe in my pants suckaz! I dunno if it'll lase, but it's sure damn loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong (and thick too!!) LOL!

ElektroFreak said:

In that case I gots a 350mW HeNe in my pants suckaz! I dunno if it'll lase, but it's sure damn loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong (and thick too!!) LOL!

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damn dude if what comes out of the end is red or green you should see a doctor!!!... :crackup::crackup::crackup::crackup:

Sh*t.....................

flecom said:

thats a hene... its probably putting out *maybe* 5mW

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Probably more like 1-2mW in top condition, possibly less than 0.5mW. A modern 5mW HeNe tube will be around 18" long and the biggest I'm aware of were the SP 125's which at around 6 feet long could do over 120mW. Most (all?) of those old side arm HeNe tubes were soft sealed so it's rare to see one working at all by now. Occasionally you can give them a helium soak to resurrect it if the problem is only helium diffusing out through the seals.

Gas lasers in general are orders of magnitude less efficient than diode lasers. The only one that even comes close is CO2 at about 10% IIRC. Ion lasers are some of the worst, I have a small argon that draws ~1200W to put out less than 30mW, it makes a great space heater but nothing else I've seen matches the beautiful green and blue lines it produces. Beam quality is another area where gas lasers really shine, nice clean round beam with little divergence.