• Question: What strength lasers do you use?

    Asked by Me to Rebecca on 10 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by cyanogen_, E_kelleher.
    • Photo: Rebecca Ingle

      Rebecca Ingle answered on 10 Nov 2014:

      I use a combination of nanosecond and femtosecond lasers. For the nanosecond lasers, when we’re generating UV light, we tend to get about 10-15 mJ per pulse but on the femtosecond laser system we get less than 1 microJ per pulse.

      Both laser systems I use are pulsed laser systems so instead of making a continuous beam of light, they pulses of light at a rate of 10 Hz (for the slower, nanosecond laser) or 1 kHz for the femtosecond laser.

      This isn’t a huge amount of power, though enough to give you a nasty burn if you stick your hand in the beam, but we don’t need very much to run our experiments.

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