What is a Green Laser?
A green laser has more versatility, strength, and brightness than traditional red lasers. This color of laser can be produced in a small, handheld tool that looks like a miniature flashlight. Amateur astronomers often use a green laser because it reaches so far into the atmosphere, with a visible beam, that you can point out stars and galaxies. Lasers are powerful lights where every wave, or piece, of light has been precisely lined up into a solid beam. Such light is said to be “collimated,” or made into a column. Different colors of light, and lasers, are determined by the size of those tiny waves, called the wavelength. The popular red laser has a wavelength of 650 nanometers, that our eyes perceives in the visible spectrum as red. However, green light has even more energy in a wavelength of a minuscule 532 nanometers. A green laser has several advantages over a red laser. First of all, green is closer to the center of the visible spectrum, so it’s easier for our eyes to perceive the
Green lasers work slightly differently from your standard keyring low powered red pointers that you can pick up for less than a 1. Green lasers are DPSS lasers. DPSS stands for Diode-Pumped Solid State. In a nutshell, this means the green laser light is made from another frequency of light first, rather than just producing green light straight away. Now let’s get the physics out of the way: Green DPSS lasers work by having a higher powered Infra-red laser diode which emits 808nm light. This is said to pump light into a crystal. Usually the crystal is a neodymium doped yttrium orthvanadate (Nd:YVO4) crystal which produces 1064 nm wavelength light. This is then frequency doubled using a nonlinear optical process in a KTP crystal, producing 532 nm light. Green DPSS lasers are usually around 20% efficient, although some lasers have been reported to be 35% efficient. In other words, a green DPSS laser using a 2.5 W pump diode would be expected to output around 500 mW of 532 nm light. So now
