Amazing White Laser Experiments!!!

everybody eight straight here now I apologize for the lack of content recently but I've been writing a fine line of getting banned by YouTube and I'm scared to upload anything out of fear of getting that arbitrary third strike but for the time being my channel is in good standing and in fact the International Day of Lights coming up and I can't let that day pass without me uploading anything so today I have a pretty cool experiment for you guys and I hope you enjoy this video the International Day of Light celebrates the awesome power of light and how much it changes our daily lives now it's on the 16th of May because this is the anniversary of the first ever laser being fired now what better way could there be to celebrate the International Day of light than with some huge freakin laser beams as you may already know every color that you see generated on your phone screens and computer monitors is made up of some combination of red green and blue light now this is really easy to see if you use a lens to magnify some pixels on a computer screen now naturally if you can do this effect with LEDs and light bulbs it'll be much better fuse lasers so today I'm going to build a couple white lasers for you to enjoy for my RGB laser I bought some red green and blue laser diodes and mounted them in heat sinks now instead of picking some super strong laser diodes I picked laser diodes that operate in single spatial mode and this gives them a really clean output and in the end will make a really nice beam when it comes to combining them now I want to point out that when I started this laser hobby blue and green laser diodes were not available yet in fact they're a fairly recent breakthrough and they're gonna revolutionize displays in the coming years so kudos to the scientists and engineers that developed them in order to balance the colors I need to be able to adjust the output power of each of the red green and blue lasers so I built a driver based on you guessed it the lm317 now here the lm317 regulates the current going into the laser diode then a potentiometer allows me to adjust the current for variable output for a power supply I just used a 12 volt charger that I got at a thrift shop ice coffee n is there and then used it to power up the circuit from there I carefully mounted everything inside of a project box added a tiny pinch of magic and then closed the whole thing up alright it's time to give this circuit a test we're good at powers on right there you can see the output of the laser sitting just below threshold I don't see if those potentiometers work okay that one works sweet alrighty so that circuit works as intended it's simple but it gets the job done now earlier I told you guys that I chose quality over quantity here in exchange for a good beam I took a little bit of a hit in the power output but these things are definitely not weak and sure it's no laser bazooka but definitely falls inside that retina frying category it has a total combined output of about 400 milliwatts I wanted to test out that color mixing so I started by pointing all the lasers at the same spots and then I adjusted the output powers of the red green and blue lasers to get the right color balance and as you can tell I did get it to look white but it's only going to look white at this spot anything before or after this point you're going to see the separate red green and blue lasers so I actually need to combine these laser beams if I want the beam and look uniform and I could do this with the prism would actually be a lot easier if I use the voodoo magic of dichroic mirrors that curl chimere's are special kinds of mirrors that let certain colors of light through while reflecting others and they typically have a very sharp cut off and here's a dichroic mirror that lets blue light straight through but reflects green and higher wavelengths now here's a sab chrome chimere's that's arranged so it can combine red green and blue light now I should also point out that this thing does work backwards I can take light of multiple colors and shine it on one side then this thing will split it up into its red green and blue components now here's a single optic that can split or combine three colors of light it's related to dichroic mirrors it's called an X cube but in reality it's really for prisons that are glued together and these prisms have coatings on the faces that make them act as dichroic mirrors I'll be using one of these X cubes that was ripped from an old projector in order to make my RGB white laser time for alignment and this part can be tricky because I want the beams to overlap as much as possible so I've dialed back the lasers power a bit for safety and I added a bit of fog to bring out the beams this makes alignment a lot easier so after a few shims and tiny adjustments they're nicely aligned now the beams overlap almost perfectly I still have to calibrate the colors now I want to point out that because this drivers analog the amount of colors that this setup can produce is actually infinite so it's way way better than the puny 16.8 million colors that you're silly monitor can produce and now I should say that even though the amount of colors that this laser computers is infinite it still cannot produce all possible colors and there it is an actual white laser beam now the color of the beam in the air versus the spot produces are actually going to be slightly different due to scattering effects but they're still pretty close to pure white light there and now it's really odd seeing this white beam traveling through the air well I'm so used to seeing super rich colors being produced by lasers so it's an odd feeling well it's a really really cool experiment all right let's do some experiments with this white laser beam so for one I can stick a prism in the beam and it's gonna split it up back into its constituent colors and in fact I could have used a prism in the first place to combine these colors and now this works because the glass has a higher refractive index at blue than it doesn't red which means it slows down the blue light more and then makes it a bend more and you can see that splits up this white light quite nicely here this property is called dispersion and it's really useful if you're making a prism when it comes to lenses it actually becomes a big problem when you see this effect in lenses it's called chromatic aberration and it's usually what's to blame when you see colourful fringes on objects and images and videos another nifty way to split the white laser beam is with a diffraction grating now a diffraction grating works by utilizing wave interference to transmit the different colors of light at different angles like I said earlier this laser can produce many different colors not just pure white light so to find all the possible colors I simply plot my input colors on a chromaticity diagram connect the dots and then everything inside that polygon is attainable with this setup compare the gamut of my RGB laser with that of a typical computer screen now these laser inputs are nearly monochromatic and that ends up giving it a bigger gamut if I turn off the blue laser then I can make every color on this line which goes from green to yellow to red now the yellow color is very prominent although it's gonna be slightly less rich than the yellow produced by a true yellow laser if I turn off the green laser then I can make purple hues now I should point out that violet and purple are not the same thing violet is a true spectral color but purple is actually just a mixture of red shutting off the red gives me a range of aqua colors but this is less impressive as these colors are quite a bit more washed out than the colors between blue and green on the spectrum for example here are some lasers in the vicinity of 500 nanometers no computer screen can render these colors properly so the only way to truly experience their colors to actually see them in person now if you just want to make a white laser beam the RGB is not the only way to do it in fact laser is like a mixed gas Krypton argon iron laser or a super continuum laser can produce white light all by themselves but if you actually want to mix colors to make it you really only need two colors to do this any line that goes through white and connects to spectral colors is a valid way to make white light now there are a lot of options here that conveniently I had 589 nanometers yellow and 488 animators cyan lasers on hand I found a dichroic mirror inside of a projector that was able to reflect the yellow light but transmitted the aqua colored light so I used this optic to combine the beams now unfortunately the beam diameter on that yellow laser is much much thinner than that on the cyan laser so that means once you go to combine the beams you can actually see that little yellow beam inside of the cyan color beam but when you actually look at the spot on the wall it is very much white you can't really see the difference in being diameters there so it's really cool seeing white light produced from dust to colors I got one more demonstration to show you guys now this effect is called the laser time tunnel it's actually a really simple effect I made a video on it when I was in high school and basically you take a mirror and glue it to a fan or other small motor and kick it off at a slight angle that way when you turn it on and shine a laser through it it maps out a cone in space and this effect looks really cool once you have fog in the air [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so that's all I have for you today but big thank you to all my patreon for supporting these projects until the next time Stacey even happy lazing

Channel: styropyro

Views: 1,485,648

Keywords: white, rgb, laser, experiment, optics, idl2018, projector, screen, color, gamut, space, powerful, full color, eye candy, day of light, spie

Id: yy-vAc6hPig

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Wed May 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/welfrkid]

this kid is going to go far in life

[u/number676766]

Got a little too acid flashback-ey at the very end with the cone effect. Cool video.

[u/Maddisonic]

That cone effect was incredible!

[u/honestquestiontime]

Why is the Scout talking to me about lazers?

[u/Kumokuro]

If you're coming from r/trees you're welcome