Anyone ever played with a 1470 nm diode?

I haven't heard much about them, but the wavelength is very close to a nice water absorption peak. I've only ever seen 1470 nm diodes at low power, except medical take-outs (I guess they are used for vericose vein removal). I was wondering if anyone here has experience with them. Obviously, being well into the NIR spectrum, I wouldn't recommend any experiments without proper IR laser safety.

I'm not sure what kind of power and optics you'd need to boil water, but I bet it'd take a lot more power than the 100 mW diodes I've seen for sale.

I've never used one of the diodes but I have used in erbium laser rod before, which a the similar wavelength. As far as trading veins that's the only thing I've ever heard of for that wavelength personally. The high water absorption allows it to treat things without going too deep. Making a fairly good surgical laser, using the water as a control mechanism.

I wasn't aware of solid state lasers that lased near that wavelength. I thought maybe there were some water-sensing applications (liquid phase) that might have made this diode a little more common, but it doesn't seem to be an application for it.

I also wondered if there existed a high power diode that could be fun to play with (assuming proper safety) to boil water directly. It might make a cool video if someone focused the beam inside of a glass of water or a puddle and made bubbles just below the surface or something.

I'll keep an eye out for take-outs, but I don't see them very often.

yeah, that 1500nm ish area is usually used for surgery, as well as machining and fiber optics communications. those are all the major things that I can think of off the top of my head.

Apparently, a Tm,Ho:YLF will also lase at ~1.5μm... If you have a spare Ti:Al2O3 available for pumping.

IIRC, Water has a peak absorption of ~5μm (in the IR anyway. I believe it absorbs EUV much better). Unfortunately, there aren't many 5μm laser sources; however a paper called "Evaluation of Rare-Earth Doped Crystals
and Glasses for 4–5-μm Lasing" may provide some sources.

A video of an invisible laser boiling water would be pretty neat, but it's unrealistic. Heating even 150ml of water (assuming all the light is absorbed and the water does not cool down) with even a 1W laser would take over 5 and a half days to boil the entire thing.

(correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't done thermodynamics in a while )

And sorry for the poorly structured post

You can focus a laser to boil a small part of a liquid. I ruined a lens that way with a 3W laser, because it spilled the boiled soft drink all over.