Hot Laser = IR

So I own a DX 5mw laser (bought from amazon, but same model), and the case was becoming quite scratched, after numerous repairs which involved removing the glued tip. I decided it would be a prefect use for heat shrink tubing. The laser opens in the middle, so I cut the heat shrink into 2 pieces, and punched a hole for the button. I used a heat gun (a.k.a. a expensive hair dryer) to shrink the tubing, and it looked great. I pushed the button, and nothing happened. My immediate response was oh crap, I heated up the laser too much and broke it. But then I noticed a faint red dot, and pulled out my cell phone camera. Turns out it was outputting a ton of IR!! It slowly faded from IR to green, and now it is back to normal. I think I should buy an IR filter now, anyone know of a good source?

I guess the lesson here is not to heat up IR filterless lasers

I don't think that the fact that laser was hot caused it was emitting more IR. You just didn't have any green, so the IR looked strong.

This does sometimes happen to me when I heat my green laser because it does the same thing when it's too cold. Green lasers are more temperature sensitive than red or BR.

Actually don't worried about the IR comming out fron your laser. It is not very strong from the laser is under 100mw. Besides you laser is only 5mw, so i really think the IR filter is not necessary.

The IR is still strong. If you look in it it can cause eye damage.

But don't look in it and don't let it reflect and nothing can go wrong.

In fact, the problem is that the temperature affect so much the crystals involving the process of converting IR to green light. Since Red or BR lasers use Red/BR diodes directly, it's obvious that temperature will only affect green lasers. It's also true that temperature affects diodes too, but it's nothing compared to the effect it has on the crystals.

So, it's not that the laser was producing more IR than normal, it's that the IR was not being converted into green. Consequently, there was a lot of IR and almost no green. The crystals that convert IR to green only work well at normal temperature