All I wanna do is re-collimate a diffuse laser reflection...
35 mW of very green laser light shining on a small white plastic object is BRIGHT. The light seems readily-enough gathered with a large objective lens, but I get hung up there time and again.
Should I be using smaller gathering lenses and/or pinhole optics in some way?
Or hell, am I better off trying to gather the light with some sort of convex mirror?
Note: my desired gathered/focused/collimated output does not need to be a tiny beam - in fact, a beam with some surface area is preferable.
Can this be done with standard optics?
2006-10-26 08:38:26 · 3 answers · asked by nowyermessingwithasonofabitch 4 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Physics
Good point, first poster - I have resigned myself to losing a lot of my original energy. My basic goal is to collimate my reflection well enough to be able to beam it through a beamsplitter and/or homemade interferometer
2006-10-26 08:46:19 · update #1
There are non-focusing optics that will concentrate diffuse light.
But really, without knowing the application it is pretty difficult to suggest the best strategy.
What does your problem have to do with thermodynamics? It seems the (except for being very complicated) you have not done anything irreversible by scattering the light.
2006-10-26 08:50:21 · answer #1 · answered by bubsir 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
What exactly are you trying to do? A reflection from a diffuse surface is spread out over 2 pi steradians. A lens can only recapture a tiny fraction of the starting energy
2006-10-26 08:42:08 · answer #2 · answered by arbiter007 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
fiber optics
2006-10-26 10:43:45 · answer #3 · answered by hell oh 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋