Project BOLT Designed to Break Records for High Powered Room Temperature Lasers
Many years ago, I built a Nd:YAG laser pistol that was capable of burning holes in metal at a distance (the FBI once contacted me over tutorials I had posted and my featured article on Hackaday.com), and I wanted to return to the concept for an upgrade. For high powered lasers one disadvantage is that they often require cyrogenic cooling:
The room temperature design of Project BOLT converts about twelve percent of its optical pump energy into useful output, which means a four kilowatt beam requires nearly thirty three kilowatts of pump light and leaves roughly sixty kilowatts of waste heat to dispose of across the pump diodes and the gain medium together. Over a ten second burst that amounts to something near 600 kilojoules, enough to bring two liters of water from room temperature to boiling and then boil most of it away.
Dreamscape Systems Inc. intends to break records. For scale, the strongest demonstrated room temperature laser of this class runs near 1.1 kilowatts. The field's record holder, cryogenically cooled, reaches about 1.5.
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