Simple Homemade Tea Laser

More info is now available. http://www.sparkbangbuzz.com/tealaser/tealaser7.htm
This is a simple homemade T.E.A. laser and is incredibly easy to make. It uses common household materials and does not require any exotic mirrors, parts, chemicals, gases, vacuum pumps, semiconductor technology etc.
You can find good material about this laser by searching tea laser on Google.

The laser beam, a short pulse of ultraviolet light, happens every time the spark gap fires.
The light from this laser is easily seen using many common materials around the house including paper, that fluoresce under the influence of ultraviolet light.

My main contribution here is to show yet another example, of how easily a T.E.A. laser can be built by someone who is not an expert in laser technology.

Some parts of the video, showing the higher rep rate, appear jumpy because I removed frames that did not synchronize with and catch the beam.

Made mone music skower.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• homemade
• tea
• laser
• ultraviolet
• light
• show
• science
• fair
• high
• voltage
• photonics
• fluorescence
• nyle
• steiner
• k7ns

[antienjigglement]

If you must have a cavity of sorts, a mirror can be placed at the spark gap end to increase the power. A sub-atmospheric N2 laser usually has a wndow and a total reflector and that's it. This is quite nice nonetheless.

[nylesteiner]

@antienjigglement

I was able to put a mirror on that end

and align the reflection spot with the

original spot but I did not have a good

way of evaluating the difference. The

difference in brightness did not not

seem to be very significant.

[VideyoJunkei]

any electric arc makes UV light....the long strip 'lines it up'

[nylesteiner]

Yet that is right, in fact, I plan to soon put up a page showing how to make a simple uv light with a corona arc but, it is very evident that the lining up in the case of the tea laser also causes laser action.

Very specific operating requirements show that there is more going on than just a simple case of constricted uv light. Many settings produce a uv light strip without a beam.

Put tea laser on google to find out more.

[Zone51]

@toadsEATbugs I tried with annodized aluminium, it didn't worked until i remove the oxyde layer. I'm using HV from ignition coil, rectified using a vaccum tube. My laser didn't work with no rectified current. You can see the setup on my channel.

[toadsEATbugs]

Mine doesn't work. I followed your setup almost exactly, except that I'm using a 2n3773 flyback driver instead of a NST. The spark gap fires about 300 times per second at 1mm, and the rails won't arc unless they are less than 0.5mm apart. It just doesn't work. Can anyone explain this?

The rails might be annodized but that wouldn't explain the spark gap.

[AntiProtonBoy]

Amusing choice of music.

[Mugrs]

The odd shaped glass was a bit odd.

[antienjigglement]

@nylesteiner I understand that situation; it probably has to be measured with an instrument. I sure don't know how to do it otherwise as the laser pulse is so short and the power may already be so high as to saturate the target's ability to make a brighter spot. I hope you will post more experiments with this kind of laser.

[voanirges]

so only current pass in N2 will lase, hm I am surprised with that fact!What direction will be the laser beam , according to spark , sorry if I bother but I really want to create one laser like this one, but I didn't figure out from this video it's construstion, and I have never heard about such behaving of N2, I heard for He/Ne,CO2 , Ge laser but this is new to me

[frothychimp]

There is no real practical way to make a traditional resonator for this laser due primarily to the extinction speed. Because of the superradiance a huge amount of the N2 is lofted into the upper lasing level when the spark gap discharges so it does no good to build a resonator particularly because the relaxation is on the order of milliseconds.