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Re: Nitrogen laser power level and gas mixture
Hi All,
Now even Terry is getting dragged into the laser thread! :-)
Many years ago (25) I built the nitrogen laser from Scientific American's
amateur scientist column (published around the mid 70s). If I remember
right, it put out 100kW very short pulses (I think I made my lasing chamber
about 2 feet long). If I put my hand in front of the beam and took a few
shots, the area on my hand would turn red for a day or so. I would imagine
it was easily powerful enough to trigger a gap. However it was quite an
effort unto itself. It too had a HV charging system, spark gap (which you
could trigger with another nitrogen laser :-)), vacuum pump, capacitor
plates (that blew up regularly), etc. Very complex compared to a small
sync rotary. I can't imagine using that thing to trigger a Tesla coil gap
to any advantage. Perhaps more modern stuff would be easier to build up
and use (I should have used poly for the caps).
BTW - I found that just air worked very well in this laser. Not worth the
trouble finding pure nitrogen. The linear gaps burned a bit but no big deal.
If anyone is going to use this laser for a spark gap and wants my advice,
write me off list and I'll try to help with the details. I probably still
have my old notes stored away.
Good luck!
Terry
terryf-at-verinet-dot-com
At 11:32 AM 11/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
>An N2 laser will most certainly not be able to ionize the gap enough, at
>least one withing our power capabilities. Conventional Blumelein N2
>lasers, because the firing time is in the 10 ns range, can consume only a
>certain amount of power-- the power is governed by the length of the
>discharge cavity and the speed of discharge, not the input current. If you
>wanted to properly ionize a gap with an N2 laser- it would have to be
>enormous, and might require optics to properly focus the beam. Also, the
>repetition rates for home-built N2 lasers are fairly low-- although I'm not
>sure that this can't be overcome.
> Building a giant-size N2 laser might be worthwhile though, if for no other
>reason than that it doesn't seem to have been done before... Because N2
>lasers are super-radiant the construction isn't terribly difficult.
> Good luck!
> Mike
>
>
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