Home-made laser runs on exhaled breath

By at 7:35 pm Monday, Jul 26  

YouTube user magx1 builds a lot of home-made gas lasers, running electric current through sealed tubes filled with various gases. When you do that, you get the gas atoms all riled up and their electrons absorb energy. Eventually, that energy gets released in the form of directional, highly focused light—a laser. There's a bit more to it than that, but you've got the idea.

One type of laser magx1 builds is called a carbon dioxide laser, though it actually contains a mixture of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, hydrogen and helium. In this video, the carbon dioxide in the mix is coming from his own breath.

By exhaling into my 'supply' balloon, I was able to get pretty good results considering! Unlike a 'proper' laser mix of CO2, N2, and He; the 'breath' trick appears to have a much narrower pressure range over which lasing will occur. But I like it anyway - it doesn't get much more DIY than this!

Magx1 doesn't provide a lot of detail on how he built this laser, but you can find a lot of good information at The Home-Built Carbon Dioxide Laser FAQ. Bill Beatty—who suggested this video through the Submitterator—says Magx1 is a guy named Jarrod Kinsey, and that he has a site dedicated to laser building.

Read more 

Maggie Koerth-Baker

I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.

Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.

Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.