Why do lasers melt stuff?

So technically, a 100mW red has the same power as a 100mW violet, just that the violet is able to transfer energy faster (because the wave is shorter), hence it has more energy and is better at burning.

Click to expand...

No.

By having a shorter wavelength you can collimate a the dot better, so you can reduce the area to a minimum that is even less than the minimum area covered by a higher wavelength laser.

A photon with shorter wavelenght have more energy.

The material can absorb one photon by some unit of time. This means that i can blast 1000 photons and just one is abosorbed. So, a shorter wavelenght is better.

But this is not perfect, it need to be a good collision, then, sometimes more photons are better.

Which case is the more usual in our day i dont know.

Ok...that was confusing, novo

NovoRei said:

A photon with shorter wavelenght have more energy.

The material can absorb one photon by some unit of time. This means that i can blast 1000 photons and just one is abosorbed. So, a shorter wavelenght is better.

But this is not perfect, it need to be a good collision, then, sometimes more photons are better.

Which case is the more usual in our day i dont know.

Click to expand...

No.

NovoRei said:

A photon with shorter wavelenght have more energy.

The material can absorb one photon by some unit of time. This means that i can blast 1000 photons and just one is abosorbed. So, a shorter wavelenght is better.

But this is not perfect, it need to be a good collision, then, sometimes more photons are better.

Which case is the more usual in our day i dont know.

Click to expand...

When you're shining a class 3b laser , be it red or violet, at an object, we're talking about a HUGE number of photons anyway.Whether it's absorbed or reflected depends on the material , not on the amount of photons. : Btw, I tend to think, and everybody else, that 1 photon is the absolute minumum amount of light that you can have.Is this true? Or can you actually go lower, since photons don't really exist outside theory?

And stop saying a 100mW red laser has the same power as a 100mW violet laser or whatever.The mW is a unit of power, when you say 100mW , you refer directly to the power of the laser.It's downright redundant. : A 1m piece of red plastic has the same length as a 1m piece of violet plastic....O RLY? :

Switch said:

[quote author=NovoRei link=1212689008/12#17 date=1212972413]A photon with shorter wavelenght have more energy.

The material can absorb one photon by some unit of time. This means that i can blast 1000 photons and just one is abosorbed. So, a shorter wavelenght is better.

But this is not perfect, it need to be a good collision, then, sometimes more photons are better.

Which case is the more usual in our day i dont know.

Click to expand...

When you're shining a class 3b laser , be it red or violet, at an object, we're talking about a HUGE number of photons anyway.Whether it's absorbed or reflected depends on the material , not on the amount of photons. : Btw, I tend to think, and everybody else, that 1 photon is the absolute minumum amount of light that you can have.Is this true? Or can you actually go lower, since photons don't really exist outside theory?

And stop saying a 100mW red laser has the same power as a 100mW violet laser or whatever.The mW is a unit of power, when you say 100mW , you refer directly to the power of the laser.It's downright redundant. : A 1m piece of red plastic has the same length as a 1m piece of violet plastic....O RLY? :[/quote]
One photon is the least amount of light you can have. Photons aren't just theory, they've been shown to exist. Supercolliders, like Fermilab (in Illinois w00t!) and CERN smash particles together, and map out where the resulting particles travel. Photons are one of those particles. The particle that CERN is looking for is the graviton, the gravity messenger particle.

We were being redundant in saying that a 100mW red is as powerful as a 100mW green because some people didn't understand that.

Yeah that because some people aren't aware that "power" is a physical measure and just think about "burning power" or "brightness" or other stuff related to StarWars.

I don't know who it was (climbak, I think) that said that photons are only made up to make everything easier...just to jump over something that we can't explain right now and continue researching as if we already knew it. :-/

Quantum physics again? No problem!