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Air ionization & lasers

Trev ---

I had heard of an air ionization but I knew I would never have the power to do it. It took several shots for me to realize what was going on.... What's that flash/bang in the middle of space???? It can be done.
HMike
 





I've seen the output of the uncompressed pulse of the Ti:Sa laser system make a spark in the air, that was 1J of 800nm in 500ps. The compressor for the pulse was in the vacuum chamber, the compressed pulse would be ~30fs long, and would probably ionise air unfocussed. The peak power of the laser was 10TW
 
I used to have a 20 Hz rep rate EO Q-switched YAG at 1064, about 10 milliJoules per shot, and 3 nanosecond pulse length. Air was easy to break down if you had some dust in it. I ruined a quite a few low quality lenses with it, it would blow pits inside the glass when it hit small inclusions. The key here is the EO instead of AO qswitch, the fast leading edge of a electro-optical q-switch dumps the cavity power much, much faster then a AO cell, because there is almost no travel time required for the Eo cell to open.

Steve
 
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I think that, essentially what it does, is charge up huge capacitors inside (that's why it takes 4 seconds to charge them) and then releases all that energy in one pulse at the pull of a trigger. That's what it seems to me, anyway. The electricity stored in the capacitors was probably calculated not to kill the head. So really, all he is using is a very powerful laser head that just happens to be pulsed because he is just powering it via cap discharge.

EDIT:

@BlueFan:
Because the laser is in the infrared, couldn't we encase the system in a sort of "glass" box that is transparent to visible wavelengths but opaque to the wavelength used in the system? That way people could view the ionization, and thus the display, and still not get damaged by the beam.
 
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DeathSimpl said:
Here is this video YouTube - REAL homemade Pulse Laser Gun ! in HIGH SPEED !

Can someone explain what this laser basically consists of, which are its main parts?
Would it be too expensive for me to build one?

That is really compact devise, outputting a big amount of energy packed in so short time interval, and it really opens many interesting topics for research :))
Click to expand...

It's a solid state laser (SSY-1 YAG with Q switch installed) which produces a short pulse (1064 nm) at power between 10 and 100 KW.
sometimes it can produce a air-breakdown when the beam is properly focused
 
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Fast forward to 23mins... Theres a demo that shows a ruby laser
ionizing.

 
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