It's a laser beam, morons!
OK, you all know I'm in this for the toys... and so I'm gonna build one.
See, the Advanced Lab class next quarter has the requirement that we design and carry out our own experiment... so I'm gonna build a laser. In fact, I'm gonna make two lasers.
Laser #1 will be an electrically-pumped nitrogen gas pulse laser operating in the UVA spectrum.. the stuff that causes sunburns. IT will be driven by a glorious 20,000 volt power supply. Remember: if it can't kill you, it isn't any fun.
This is the pump for laser #2, AKA the cool one. This is an optically pumped fluorescent dye laser with tunable optics. Using these organic lasing dyes we can get a bean in any color we want by changing dyes and tweaking the diffraction grating we are using as a 'Back Coupler' or mirror. What does this mean? Pretty purple laser!
I was worried for a while about getting the optics... good diffraction gratings will run you $1000 or more, not to mention the mounting stage and such. Luckily, I got bored last week and started rummaging through the junk in the supply closet and... viola! I found an old Spec-20 chemical spectrometer gathering dust on a shelf. This thing really doesn't really do anything that we need in Physics, so I checked and we'll be able to cannibalize this thing... thus solving both the largest engineering and financial problems in one stroke. I'll be sure to get photos & movies once we start working... I want to document this.