Green Lasers Are Better Than Red Lasers
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If you’re a techie, chances are you remember playing around with one of those red-beam laser pointers when they first came out. There are certainly a lot of ways to use it. At school or work you can use them when presenting PowerPoint slides. For fun, you’ve probably confused your pet with them and pointed them at friends’ foreheads.
But now the novelty of red-beamed laser pointers has worn off. They’re nothing new to see, and almost everyone has one. It’s a good chance that even your grandma, who has no idea what PowerPoint even is, has one. If you want to get the best technological toy out there, you’ve got to move to the next level.
Any techie knows that the red beams use 650 nm wavelengths. Powerful new laser pointers on the much improved 532 nm wavelength are now available on the market. And do you know what the more intense frequency creates? It creates a green beam.
So if you got your kicks by using your old red laser beam to highlight things on a projection screen across the room, imagine how good you’ll feel using a green laser pointer to highlight things that used to be out of reach. Because a green laser beam is more powerful than a red one, it can highlight clouds, low-flying aircraft, and even star constellations. Best of all, you can see the green laser beam outside during full sunlight.
This equipment is so strong that it could actually get you arrested! Yes, arrested. Pointing a green laser beam at an aircraft could have the FBI on your case, wondering if you’re planning possible terrorist operations from your backyard. Pretty neat, huh? Your old dinky red pointer can’t do that.
And the green laser pointer doesn’t produce just a wee little spot. You can see the whole beam as it travels to the stars. Think Luke and his light saber. See the possibilities?
A green laser pointer is at a whole separate plane from the old-style red laser pointer. For a true green, a pointer needs a green direct injection laser diode. These diodes could be potentially dangerous if handled by the public at large, so they’re not even available wholesale. So this complicated process follows to keep hazardous material out of peoples’ hands. (And only the geeks in the room will understand a word of it.)
The green laser pointers, available on the market today, all use Diode Pumped Solid State Frequency Doubled technology, aka DPSSFD, which is good news for everyone. Basically, this means that an infrared laser diode pumps out 808 nm, which is then altered to 1,064 nm, which is then shot into a crystal that doubles the frequency to produce the green beam at 532 nm. (It should go without saying, because only card-carrying geeks are reading this, which with frequency smaller numbers mean stronger.)
Needless to say, green laser pointers are the rave among the geek elite. They’ve been around since 2000, but not so easy to find outside of technical settings. They’re not cheap–you can pick up a red pointer for less than 10 bucks, and a green one will set you back 50 or so–but who can resist this little piece of geekdom? You know you want one. Yeah, you really need one.
