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FrozenGate by Avery

noob question, make you feel smart, or me stupid






Okay so all beams, contrary to uneducated opinion, don't go straight.

Basically after they exit the lens, they will focus down to one spot, then "spread out."

The less spreading that occurs, the smaller the dot will be at long distances.

This spread is called divergence, and is measures in mrad.

Anything else?
 
so say a laser has .5mrad then the smallest point is .5 mrads away form he lense?
 
Not quite. Mrad is a unit to measure the divergence (spread) of the beam.

Where the beam is smallest is called the focal point
 
Radians is an angle. .5 Mrad means that that is the angle at which the beam gets larger the farther away from the focusing lens
 
Milliradians, a division of radians, it's a standard angle measurement. Used in a lot of fields, not just lasers. Especially if you're talking about deviations less than a degree - specifically small divergences over long distances. (Satellites/microwave, astronomy, lasers of course, and in some cases firearms.) If you have a circle of radius x, one radian is the angle that occurs when the outer arc length is equal to the radius of that circle.

One milliradian would be 1/1000th of that. If your laser source point (diode or OC mirror) is the 'center of the circle', and x measurement along your beam is the radius, the width of the beam at x feet would be your arc length.

The angle developed between source point, along beam of specified (x) distance when the beam is at (n) thickness gives you your mRad reading.

so radians=n divided by x; or radians = width of beam at distance x, divided by x. (same units.) With a laser that number will be far <1, so you'd measure it in milliradian or millirads.

EDIT: Guess it was a troll, but, leaving it here for future searches.
 
Last edited:
Really? Because most of those explanations were ridiculously complicated.

Mrad is a way of measuring divergence, divergence is the rate at which the beam gets wider and wider the further away it goes. Mrad is basically measuring how quickly the beam gets wider.

35240076.jpg


Little diagram to help :)
 
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