Having Fun With Green Lasers
Today, just about everyone owns a red beam laser pointer. Whether it has been used at work in conjunction with a PowerPoint presentation or to amuse yourself by teasing your cat or dog or, better yet, used to plant a red dot on your friend's forehead, red beam lasers have been around for a while and contributed to many fun moments in the lives of otherwise sober techno-geeks and non-geeks as well.
But, let's face it, red laser pointers are just so old school now. Everyone has one. Your grandmother has one, and she doesn't even use PowerPoint. You need a new toy to make you the top geek at work and create new fun with your friends, furry and not.
Red lasers, as any good geek knows, use the boring old 650 nm wavelength. The cool new laser pointer that we're going to tell you about uses the far more powerful 532 nm wavelength. And, best of all, that means it's green.
Green goes further and shines brighter than red, meaning that it can highlight objects from a greater distance. Instead of just pointing the beam on your friend across the room or the PowerPoint slide behind you, you can now direct the green beam on clouds and constellations in the sky. It's so powerful and bright that it's even visible outside in the 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.
Furthermore, the green laser pointer doesn't produce a tiny little spot. Oh no, it turns out that your green laser lets you see the whole beam as it travels to the stars. Think Luke Skywalker kinds of power! Are you beginning to see the possibilities here?
To make a green laser pointer, you need a whole level of technology way past the red laser pointer. The true green laser pointer requires a green direct injection laser diode, and these are not available for public consumption. So, there's a whole complicated thing they have to do. (This next paragraph is only for extreme geeks.)
The green laser pointers you can buy on the market now are all using the very impressively named Diode Pumped Solid State Frequency Doubled technology, which gets shortened to DPSSFD, which is good for everyone. What this means is 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. (With frequency, smaller numbers mean stronger, but you knew that right? Only a geek actually read this paragraph.)
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.