Laserscope Blanking

[ltaudi1]

Ok I am ready for the ridicule and harassment, but I feel I must ask as I was thinking the other night. I have a spare Laserscope minus a KTP and a ALE. But a good qswitch and a driver, ok could I place my spare qswitch down beam path before or after the collimator. And use it for blanking, first pulse suppression should be handled by actual qswitch. I am not looking for perfect raster scanned images, I realize it is not a graphics projector. But going this route will alleviate the pesky chopper galvo and amp. Steve please chime in as to why this wont work so I can get it off of my mind.

[mixedgas]

Other then the AR coatings are possibly not optimized for 532, there is no reason this would not work. I'd expect this to have a lot of loss and some adsorption in the crystal. By definition a Qswitch AO is still a AO. The green beam is tighter then the IR beam, so you need to avoid having the AO cell at a beam waist in case of high green peak power causing damage.

You may find yourself reducing the RF drive to the AO to avoid making multiple diffracted beam orders, as well. A Qswitch AO is typically overdriven in order to make more loss intracavity by making more then just the first order Bragg Diffraction.

Make sure you hook up the AO cell cooling.

Watch your eyes when you do this, and test it with a low power DPSS before you place it in the Laserscope beam path.
I would also make sure this is not my sole way to blank the Laserscope.

Safety First.

Steve.

[dsli_jon]

....But going this route will alleviate the pesky chopper galvo and amp.

Q-switching q-sw'd output? Maybe CW, but.. Pretty-sure 'going this route', q-sw'd, will do nothing but put holes in the the coatings of yer other q-sw, at-best.. I well-could be violently-wrong, but.. If using a Q-sw to blank (w/ another, inline..) was a 'cinch', I'm sure we'd all long-since be doing it.. Talk to Laserman532 about 'using the Q-sw for blanking'..(imho..) You'll quickly-become convinced that 'pesky mech. blanking' is really not so-pesky, after-all...

http://a4.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/i...f583b98a/l.jpg
(..yes, that is mech-blanked LS-output.. not too stinkin-bad, ya? ..and, even Q-sw'd output, thru a well-tuned / aligned XYB-head, can-achieve decent output:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphot..._1983959_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.n..._4383839_n.jpg yada, yada..

Dos fichas..
j

[Laserman532]

me thinks, if you put it extra cavity in the green you may want to do some beam shaping to get a waist at the AO when at the correct angle..I used the intra cavity QS as my blanking, when properly aligned, you get only the slightest tail in the image. Seems you are replicating something that is already there. But then again, i am old and have forgotten a lot My biggest concern is the peak powers will damage the second q switch