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FrozenGate by Avery

Can a 405 nm laser be used for a dye laser?






N2 lasers operate in pulsed mode and are capable of high instantaneous output levels.

You could theoretically pump a dye with 405nm but you would need an impressive knife edge and PBS Cube beam combining setup with high end optics to bring the resultant beam into a small enough spot for the necessary irradiance factor to get the dye to lase. I'd say bare minimum you would need something like 20W of 405nm and then be able to focus it down into a 100um spot or better.
 
20 watts of 405. Thats a bit out of capability.
I suppose I could try building a rudimentary nitrogen laser. I've seen videos of people using home made nitrogen lasers to pump dyes.

You say N2 lasers are pulsed, but the videos I've seen show a continuous beam, so I'm guessing the pulse rate is very high.

I'm still curious if I could get say a 1 watt 405 if I could even get the tiniest amount of lasing from a dye if I got it focused tight enough....

Looked at some lab 355 nm lasers, and damn those things are expensive. 2500$ for 5 mW....
 
There are other factors involved with pumping dye lasers too, such as parasitic absorbance (the dye is pumped by it's own emission wavelength) and third state time (after being excited it settles to an intermediary state where it will not lase again if pumped until it has time to return to the ground state) to name a few big ones. It's no small undertaking.

Typically the irradiance levels needed for lasing are far above what a simple <5W CW can achieve with even professional optics. You can only focus a beam down to so small of a size (1x wavelength at best) and irradiance is a measure of power per unit area, so either increase the power or decrease the area.
 
Hmm...

How is it then that many dye lasers are pumped by CW argon ion lasers at only a watt or two of output?
 
I have no experience with ArIon pumped dye lasers (and honestly the thought of which doesn't ring a bell, could just be my memory though), just dye lasers pumped by Nd:YAG pumped 532nm Q-switched units. Disabling the Q switch resulted in ~10W (+-5W) of CW 532nm output which resulted in no dye lasing at all.
 
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