Interesting flourescence from green laser

I notices some striking flourescence when the green laser hits flourescent orange objects, here is the result of shining the 100mw laser at the orange panel inside a casette tape player

Another of the beam hitting a spent orange cyclume (glow) stick

and now a green one

I notice that many of the pink, red, and orange plastic parts in my children's toys flouresce in the same way when hit with green laser light.

I was also surprised to learn many "day-glo" colored things flouresce even with just blue LED light.  I had thought only UV would do it.

It's an intentional effect. Day-glo objects achieve the effect because they flouresce off of medium and short wavelength light like blue and green, which is present in all daylight and room lighting.

Makes me wonder if there's a way to make a er… a "DPSSDL" Diode pumped, solid-state, dye laser with a simple tube of the right dye and some cavity optics on the front of a green DPSS.

It would be inneficient as hell, 500mW of IR to produce +/- 100mW of green, to produce maybe 10mW of Yellow/Orange, but it would still be a lot cheaper and more powerful than the DPSS orange/yellow units that produce a measly 1-2mW right now for several hundred, if not thousands of dollars.

Of course, you can achieve nearly the same end-result (sort of) with red + green and a dichro filter/mirror, but that's bulky and complicated. A little screw on vial of the right dye and optics would keep everything in pen format.

i have a broken surfboard in my room thats pink, and when i shine my laser on it, the dot turns yellow just like in your picture. its pretty fun to do, and i fooled my friend once by saying "look dude i got a yellow laser", cuz he likes lasers too and knows how expensive a yellow would be.

its kind of weird the way it works. i dont really understand it.

laserterd said:

i have a broken surfboard in my room thats pink, and when i shine my laser on it, the dot turns yellow just like in your picture. its pretty fun to do, and i fooled my friend once by saying "look dude i got a yellow laser", cuz he likes lasers too and knows how expensive a yellow would be.

its kind of weird the way it works. i dont really understand it.

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Atoms in the pink/orange/red dyes are excited by the incoming green (or other shortwave) light. The electrons absorb some of the light-energy and express it by jumping up to a higher energy-state orbit around the nucleus of the atom. They then fall back down to a lower energy state, releasing that energy as a quanta of light, in this case one that corresponds to the yellow wavelength region of the spectrum.

The unusualy bright "glow" of day-glow objects under normal lighting is the fluorescence adding itself above and beyond the "normal" reflective illumination, so there's some emissive light coming back from the day-glow object along with the reflected light.

Regular reflective colors we see, (aside from a "perfect" black that absorbs everything, or a perfect "silver" that reflects everything,) are selectively absorbing and reflecting certain wavelengths depending on their physical properties, which is why they are reflecting the colors we perceive to our eyes that happens on a molecular level. (A red balloon for instance is latex rubber with a red dye in it that absorbs all wavelengths and expresses them as heat, BUT red, which it reflects.) Fluorescence is more on the atomic level where the electron excitement and released photon quanta are reacting unusually efficiently to a certain incoming wavelength and re-emitting a different color entirely.

That actually cleared quite a bit up for me. So what other colors can our lasers flouresce to? Mainly our green and red lasers. ive only noticed it on pinkish or orangish things, like cones, where the dot turns yellow.

Try this, put on goggles and point a green laser at a pink/orange thing that floureces. When the dot hits the object, it suddenly gets bright because your goggles only block green, not orange! It's a cool effect.

Yes flourescence is an amazing thing, I too only thought violet light would do it not green. Id love a violet laser though as they say just about everything flouresces to some degree with one.
Ive yet to get laser glasses, I guess I should though

So what other colors can our lasers flouresce to? Mainly our green and red lasers. ive only noticed it on pinkish or orangish things, like cones, where the dot turns yellow.

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You can make several things fluoresce with a green laser. The dye in glowsticks works well, but so do some pigments used in plastic - mainly yellow and orange ones. Sometimes red works too though, i just hit the red isolation on a crocodile clamp with a green laser and it lights up red. Just try some things you have lying around

With a red laser it's not possible to get visible fluorescence, as the emmitted photons are always of lower energy and would thus be in the infrared. Some materials exist that can upconvert, by taking either 2 fotons (like DPSS doubler crystals), or by using stored energy in the material (like IR 'detector cards').

yeah a dye laser made by shining a green laser through a flourescent thing, to bad the beam comes out green, even though the beam is red/orange/yellow inside the flourecent thing, it's really weird! stupid photons! ;D ;D ;D ;D

Don't blame the photons

When you pass green light to a fluorescent material, such material re-emits light on a longer wavelength, but also in random directions. Light that doesnt interect with the dye comes out the other side just as it was - coherent, in a beam, and in its original color.

Not sure if this goes here but... I have the glass ball with some sort of metallic purple paint on it. When the beam hits it, it turns red.

Greenie said:

Not sure if this goes here but...  I have the glass ball with some sort of metallic purple paint on it.  When the beam hits it,  it turns red.

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purple turns the laser red????what the??

Surely possible. If the paint on that thing turns green light into red, but leave blue light unaltered, it would surely appear (brightly) purple under full spectrum light.