Lasers
HeNe | CO₂ | Argon Ion | Excimer

One of the large projects in the Summer of 2003 was to get an Excimer laser running in our lab at Niagara College. We had three Excimer lasers, and we chose to use this one; a Lumonics Excimer-500 laser. This laser was picked mainly because it offeres full manual control of the laser (including gas mix). When this laser is used in labs (for the first time in 2004) it will be a demonstration laser showing students how to properly mix the gas in Excumer lasers. Our excimer is currently being used as a TEA Nitrogen laser at a total pressure of about 45 psi.

There was a lot of work done to get this laser in working condition; the laser had to be mounted on a stand which could also accomidate an optical breadboard for components. All plumbing to the laser had to be installed; both gas an water. Water leaks inside had to be fixed, and the optics had to be cleaned. Luckily the power supply and the thyratron worked fine when the laser was first fired up (there was a lot of projects on the go, and there wouldn't have been much time to start troubleshooting a 40kV power supply!). Pictures of the Excimer are shown below.

Picture of the Excimer with the covers removed, the laser head can be seen at the top with the output coupler on the left

Picture of the Excimer's thyratron; this sends the electrical discharge (about 40kV) through the laser

Picture of the Excimers massive 40kV power supply. A grounding probe was installed to manually ground the high voltage components (incase the bleading resistors don't work) whenever the covers are removed.

Picture of the output coupler of the Excimer