Laser&Electro-Optics

[Guest Fatal_Byte]

      Hello everyone,

      I know this may not be the exact area for this question but I was wanting to ask. Does anyone work (as in a career) with lasers? Or have a degree in Lasers? If so, could you tell me any information you may think I should know. I'm a second year Laser&Electro-Optics and Electronics Technology student, and I was just wanting to ask a few questions. Career questions, and that sort of thing, I just would like them to be answered from an actual person instead of "hear-say". Feel free to e-mail me with any info.

                        Thanks,
                                  Fatal_Byte

[Kevin Weddle]

Hi. I have worked on CO2 LASER's before. They were 20W to 50W at about 20K nanometers. There was this thing called breakdown in which the combined sine waves collapsed upon application to the tube. They tended not to and you had to adjust this variable capacitor to get it to. There was this tickle pulse and something called a bleed. The LASER's operated on about 12VDC and had a square wave applied to them. The pulse applied was between 1ms and 3ms with a variable duty cycle. The idea was to adjust this pot, affecting the tickle pulsewidth, until you get the same power dissipated between the 1ms pulse at a lower duty cycle and the 3ms at a higher duty cycle. Something like that.

[MP]

I work with lasers, as well. However, unlike Kevin, I have never tickled one.  ;D ;D

Fatal_byte:  You should ask specific questions, this is a very big area of electronics. I am sure there are many members on this forum who have experience in this area.

MP

[Guest Fatal_Byte]

Hi, Thanks for the replies!


        The main questions I had were, where do you work? How interesting has your job been? Is the pay sufficent? How stressful is your job? Is there any area in lasers that seem to be particularly interesting? I'm hoping that I will be hired on at a nearby military base, but I would like to keep my options open to other companies and areas. I still have a pretty good while before I graduate, at least a year and a half to two years.

                  Thanks again,
                                    Fatal