If you wish to broach LASER’s concept technically, the first thing you should probably learn is that LASER is an acronym. It expands to Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. But to a layman, a LASER device is just another light source with a special property. It can be channelized into a single straight line and is visible from a long distance, while normal light sources fade away into convex beams.
Now, as the book “LASER: Light of a Million Use” rightly points out, the uses of a LASER light source are plenty, but what are you buying it for? You might have seen professors dangling a pen during presentations and using it to point at screens. That’s the simplest form of a LASER light, commonly used as a pointing device at slide shows and exhibitions. It doesn’t matter if you use red LASER or green LASER as long as it serves the purpose. With the rate of pollution due to fireworks, it would be nice to have a LASER light display instead of smoke and fire across the sky on Fourth July or Guy Fawkes’ Day. If you’re a pyromaniac, you may even use LASER to ignite paper, cardboard boxes, cotton, and matches. Use your creativity even to light a cigarette or a fat Cuban cigar if you are a smoker.
In glass-cutting industries, they are used for cutting glass with impressive precision and accuracy. This has recently been extrapolated to many other sectors. If you’re in construction, this can be used to measure the distances and depths of structures. Its practical application in science extends to biology, spectroscopy, and chemistry. A regular camper might consider using LASER beams to scare away wild animals. Unless you’re a soldier, you will not carry a high-power LASER beam generator of more than 1W power because it becomes a potential weapon. Battlefields usually have much to do with LASER, where they are used as weapons and beacons.
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While you don’t have to be a scientist, some scientific knowledge would help you understand how LASER is generated. The term’s expansion gives a succinct description of how a LASER beam is created. Let’s take you back to the basics of matter; as you know, all case is made of molecules composed of tiny particles called atoms. An atom has a central nucleus made of protons and neutrons; small negatively charged particles called electrons circulate the heart similarly to that of the sun and the planets in the solar system. This is just a depiction of the balanced state of an atom. Consider that the atom is heated or given a bit of energy in some form – this causes the electrons in its orbit to go to an excited state, resulting in an excited atom. If you extrapolate this concept to an object that contains millions of atoms, you have myriad atoms in their excited state. But how is the beam of red light generated? The answer is simple – atoms’ tendency to return to their balanced state creates a light energy packet called a photon. It’s something like this – somebody gives you money, you become extremely excited, and then you decide that you were better off when you didn’t have any money and throw it into a lake, except that there are a million other people like you dumping all their money in a lake. This way, when all the photons come together and travel in a single direction, they form a LASER beam.
It doesn’t take much to be enthralled by small LASER sources. Its cool applications attracted people from all walks of life – professors, architects, engineers and builders, security forces, and even kids. Why? If you have to ask why, it just means you do not know about LASER beams. What could be cooler than having a LASER light source in your hand? You can have light shows in different colors and have a lot of fun flashing it into your neighbor’s house while he struggles to comprehend the small red dot’s source. You can even stand out from the smoking crowd by lighting your cigarette with a LASER light while people use spirit lighters.
There are different kinds of LASER pointers in the market, and their size and structure depend entirely on the application for which they are to be used. For instance, the smallest pointers are generally utilized by lecturers during presentations. Combination lasers can be used in LED torches and even for disco lights. If you were a clubber, you would have seen red, green, and blue lights coming out from the ground for special effects while dancing at clubs. They are dual or combination Lasers. Have you seen red dots appearing on a person’s chest or forehead in movies when the SWAT team or other special forces target him? Well, they are LASER gun sights.
If you own a LASER pointer, you would have probably shone it into the sky and checked to see if you can see how far it reaches. A small tip LASER would probably not even be visible, while a larger light source may stretch through a certain distance; the only determinant of the brightness and the distance at which a LASER beam shines is the beam’s power. LASER pointers can vary from 5mW and go up to 300mW – these are available to the common public. Attempts to purchase beams of a higher power capacity require you to get attested documents stating the purchase reason. Of course, higher-power LASER beams are expensive. The more powerful cool gadgets get, the more the number of questions about the danger they pose and the legal issues that accompany them. Unless you’re a doctor performing a LASER eye surgery, you would not want to shine your LASER beam directly into a person’s eyes; this could cause permanent damage and even blindness. Shine a LASER of mediocre power at a single point for too long, and you’ll notice that the target becomes warm. Shining a This leads us to the next question of whether it is legal; the answer lies in how you use these beams. You could be arrested for shining LASER beams at airplanes and ships; the list has been recently appended with “football matches” when a fan chose to shine a LASER directly on the ground, which affected the course of the game.
If you’re just amazed by these things and are just looking to own one of these beauties, eBay or any of these auction sites would be a good choice. They come cheap; however, the catch is that you won’t get the product in the advertisement. So, if you’re a person who can tell between a 5mW beam and a 20mW beam, look somewhere else; if you don’t, go ahead and use auction websites. Let’s say you are a professor looking to acquire a LASER source for a spectroscopy experiment; in this case, stay away from eBay. Instead, browse the many online forums with LASER pointers for the core topic. K-mart, Walmart, and Target are good places to start, while you can also visit the websites of specialty shops online to order your beam.
