White laser

I finally found a dichro that can add red to my Argon to make a white laser. It came from an old PC screen projector that work happened to be throwing out (result).It is a 3 colour dichro wheel that must spin and seperate the rgb to project a full colour image, anyhow this works perfectly to combine the multiline spectrum of the argon and my controlable red. I also harvested a few other prisms and lenses.

To make a white laser you traditionally need to combine 3 sources, red, green and blue. This usually requires the use of 2 dichroic mirrors. One to combine the red and green to make yellow and the next to combine the blue to make full colour.

Because the argons main lines are in the blue and green, half of the job is already done and all you have to do is a single red combine.

This is still not as easy as it sounds, setting a dichro to the perfect angle to combine over distance is a real pain in the ass and takes lots of patience. The dichro also has another bad side effect, It acts as a prism and tends to split up the multi line componants of the argon, so any white produced is only good over short distances.

Now onto the pics.

First up the combine, best match to white I could get was Argon at about 30mw and red about 110mw.

http://www.laserenthusiast.com/forums/showthread.php?t=885