What kind of gas laser would this be?

[Byrnz93]

We had a school trip to the University of Queensland a while back and remember being shown several gas lasers. I'm very sure the guide said they were gas lasers.
Anyway, the lasers had around 3 slots on top in which these card-like things could be inserted. The combination of the cards apparently determined the output colour. If I remember correctly, some of the colours that could be produced were red, orange, yellow and green.
After doing some reading around the forum I didn't find anything about any laser similar to this. Does anyone have any ideas of what they could be?

 

[photonaholic]

Probably a multi line argon and the cards were diffraction gratings.

 

[daguin]

The color lines suggest Helium/Neon The things placed into the slots were "filters."

Peace,
dave

 

[MarioMaster]

Yeah sounds like either a HeNe or a krypton ion laser, and placing filters inside the resonator cavity to kill lasing on non-target wavelengths

 

[Laser_Ben]

That would be a krypton laser, and then they were placing blocking filters, or bandpass filters on the output, not in the cavity.

 

[photonaholic]

That would be a krypton laser, and then they were placing blocking filters, or bandpass filters on the output, not in the cavity.

WORD:wave:

All speculation is now over. (just google krypton laser)

 

[Byrnz93]

Thanks a lot for the great info guys! Reading up on krypton lasers right now.

 

[Bluefan]

It can't be a HeNe, the tunable lasers are extremely expensive, cant just have anything inserted in the cavity and need to be tuned to the specific wavelength anyway.

Krypton has many lines, and can be multiline. And thus can be filtered very easy.