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Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
Hi guys, thanks for the tips.
One thing I'm especially fascinated by now are mechanical Q switches. If they are possible they would be an extremely robust solution (and also much cheaper than pockels cells). How do they work after all? I imagine there is no way to break a beam mechanically unless it's focused to a micrometer size. And it would still take many microseconds instead of nanoseconds to switch.
PS. Sam's faq seems to tell it's indeed very hard for nd:yag, would need to be done in ~ 100us compared to 3ms for ruby. what about tilting the reflective mirror by a piezo?
I would recommend leaving out the qswitch for now. If you do manage to get a qswitch working it's rather easy to get above the damage treshold of the components and in particular of the nd:yag rod. Damage in the rod will most like be in the form of gray tracks, something that can't be repaired.
Registered Member #2261
Joined: Mon Aug 03 2009, 01:19AM
Location: London, UK
Posts: 581
Yes, you can tilt the back mirror, but the only way I've heard that's used is to have a mirror rotated fast by a motor so it aligns once per revolution.
From the laser faq: GTE/Sylvania Driver module and rotary prism Q-switch.
Registered Member #2901
Joined: Thu Jun 03 2010, 01:25PM
Location:
Posts: 837
Do you really need Q-switching? John Singer dumps pulses with a couple 100 MWatt of peak electrical power into his xenon flash tubes ... with a good circuit and 6 tubes you might be able to hit a Gigawatt.
Although at 100 Hz I don't think they'd live long that way ... would probably need to simmer the lamps so the arc doesn't hit the walls too much.
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Homemade flash-lamp pumped lasers
