On Tue, Apr 20, 2004 at 02:53:58AM -0500, Ronn!Blankenship wrote: > One of my students asked a question in the middle of class last night > that I had no answer for: in the standard red diode laser pointer that > you can now buy for chump change just about anywhere, what is the > element or compound which produces the light? E.g., in a ruby laser, > it is the chromium atoms, and in a He-Ne gas laser the helium is used > to pump the neon into the state where it will lase, so what is it in > the el-cheapo diode laser, like the one I was using at the time to > point to the figure being projected on the wall? Hydroxyl masers in > protostars, now that's a subject I can at least make some intelligent > comments about . . .
The cheap ones are AlGaAs/GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well laser diodes (they usually have a few QW's in the gain region, and a stepped or graded AlGaAs region for optical confinement). -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/
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