Largest HeNe Laser?
(From: Chris Leubner (cdleubner@ameritech.net).) The most powerful HeNe laser I have ever seen was 160 mW of real power and was the only time I’ve ever seen a HeNe laser burn anything before with raw beamage. It would slowly burn electrical tape placed in the beam and felt warm on your skin. It was made of two almost 6 foot long Spectra-Physics model 125 tubes hooked electrically to separate power supplies and optically in series in a custom made double-wide sized 125 head. Sadly, it doesn’t work anymore and is currently resting piecefully in the NTC laser department’s laser graveyard. 🙁 (From: Steve Roberts (osteven@akrobiz.com).) I’ve seen a normal SP-125 break 160 mW on its own. Two tubes at only 160 mW sounds like it was misaligned, not that I’d like to try to align that one! 🙂 The current record is for a Chinese researcher using 2 tubes with a flattened elliptical profile in a V fold resonator to get 330+ mW into a fiber. The beam shape and divergence from this are not what you
