Last year my physical chemistry students and I attempted to design and build a dye laser from scratch. This is both easier and harder than you think. Several papers and an excellent web site provide background information and plans, but a good deal of patience is required to achieve an actual laser pulse. Limited time led to limited success for us.
Lots of different dyes will lase and you see the occasional reference on the web to Jello and whiskey lasers. These sound like urban legends, but in fact are not. Arthur Schawlow, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1981 with Townes for building the laser, shows you can make Knox gelatin lase. See "Laser Action of Dyes in Gelatin", T. W. Hansch, M. Pernier, A. L. Schawlow, IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, January 1971, pp. 45-6. Interestingly, the longevity of the laser improves if you jiggle it.
Science in the Kitchen 1: Extracting DNA
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life

Field of Science
-
-
Chandra and Johnny come close to discovering black holes19 hours ago in The Curious Wavefunction
-
Friday Fabulous Flower1 day ago in The Phytophactor
-
-
Europe's pause on the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine plays right into anti-vaxxers' hands3 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?6 months ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
Daily routine1 year ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China2 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM2 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey3 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV4 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!4 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!6 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez6 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens6 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl8 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House9 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs9 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby10 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files

The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS