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Building a Free Electron Laser?

micheal rosen

micheal rosen

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Mar 22, 2015
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Hi, so, i felt like asking something crazy: would it be possible to build a free electron laser at home? i think this would be awesome... high power, in any region of the EM spectrum that you want, but how feasible would it be?
 





Can it be done at home? No.

Not unless you've got 6-7 figures to spend on the electron gun, massive vacuum chamber, magnet arrays, Klystron arrays, radiation shielding, Vacuum pump arrays, and high voltage supplies... enough equipment to fill an average house.
 
micheal rosen said:
Hi, so, i felt like asking something crazy: would it be possible to build a free electron laser at home? i think this would be awesome... high power, in any region of the EM spectrum that you want, but how feasible would it be?
Click to expand...

Probably not, the size and cost of the "cavity" is restrictive to begin with, not to mention needing a particle accelerator to actually produce electrons with a high enough energy and rather large magnets to make them "resonate". All very large and expensive equipment.

Some terms in quotation marks because free electron lasers don't quite resonate or have a cavity in the sense most of us would be familiar with.

Edit: Cyp bet me to it! :p

Edit again: Obviously that's a very condensed equipment list that I've posted.
 
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Cyparagon said:
Can it be done at home? No.

Not unless you've got 6-7 figures to spend on the electron gun, massive vacuum chamber, magnet arrays, Klystron arrays, radiation shielding, Vacuum pump arrays, and high voltage supplies... enough equipment to fill an average house.
Click to expand...

yeah i kinda figured. would be fun as a community funded project.
 
micheal rosen said:
yeah i kinda figured. would be fun as a community funded project.
Click to expand...

I'm not even sure all of the members on LPF together could afford to build such a thing.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net.../Laser2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20121009020925

Ewald_Fellowships.jpg


https://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl...d=0ahUKEwij3sHIgefJAhWJHx4KHTHOAmIQMwg-KBMwEw

Stanford’s laser reportedly cost several hundred million dollars to build, and the cost of a new European X-FEL has been set at one billion euro (US$1.3 billion). Researchers from the Netherlands’ Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), however, have recently announced the development of a tabletop “poor man’s X-FEL.” It performs some of the same key functions as the big laser, but costs under half a million euro (US$656,006).
Click to expand...


The rest of the article: http://www.gizmag.com/scientists-create-poor-mans-x-fel/17367/

Certainly would be cool if we had a million dollars just lying around! :P
 
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