The Nd:YAG laser in the G02 lab is a very
high powered pump
laser. Each pulse from the laser pumps
500 millijoules of energy in just 10 nanoseconds. This
means
each
pulse
is
50 million
watts. While the laser is used to pump a
dye laser which will be used to excite atoms and molecules, an
experiment was
performed to see how the laser beam would interact with a candle flame.
Above is a picture taken of the flame of the
candle. The CCD camera used takes black
and white
pictures. To get this picture output,
the picture was loaded into Matlab to get the color scaling shown in
the above
picture. The color scaling corresponds
to how much light the camera receives in each pixel.
As seen, the flame generates a lot of light
and glows red in the scaled picture. When
the Nd:YAG laser is turned on, the beam travels
directly through
the center of the flame.
The above picture shows the influence of the
laser
beam. The laser hits the right side of
the flame and forces it to the left. Also
the impact of the laser causes bursts of light that
illuminate the
entire room. These bursts can be seen by
the splashing effect of the light in the picture.
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