have you ever used a laser??

Question: have you ever used a laser??
- Keywords:
  laser,
  work
Asked by it5me to Andrew, Ash, Gem, Paige, SJ on 28 Jun 2012.
- SarahJayne Boulton answered on 28 Jun 2012:
  
  I use a 2 lasers on a nearly daily basis!
  One is an argon laser that is on one of the confocal microscopes we have, and the other is an argon/krypton laser that’s on a different microscope!
  
  I use neat dyes to stain cells for certain chemicals. When the laser shines on them at a certain wavelength, the dyes shine back at a different wavelength, letting us know they’ve bound onto whatever they were looking for. This ‘shining back’ called fluorescence, and is really useful for finding out whats going on in skin samples!!
- Andrew Thomas answered on 28 Jun 2012:
  
  Yes I use an ultrafast laser in some of my experiments. Each pulse that comes out of the laser is only 40 femtoseconds (fs) long, that’s 0.00000000000004 seconds so really really short. We mix two laser colours at the surface of our sample and if something on the surface vibrates at the frequency of one of the lasers then they generate a third colour which we can detect. It’s called sum frequency spectroscopy and only one other lab in the world has a set up like ours!
  
  It tells us what molecules stick to our surface and how they bond. By hitting the sample with a another laser we can get electrons to jump from the molecule to the surface of the material we are looking at and this changes the vibrations of the molecules so if we hit it with the sum frequency lasers a few fs later we can calculate how fast the charge is transferring and how long it takes for the molecule to “cool down” again.
- Paige Brown answered on 28 Jun 2012:
  
  Yes, I have!!! I have used lasers in a confocal microscope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confocal_microscopy) to view fluorescent molecules inside cells – molecules that glow if you hit them with a special kind of light! We can use fluorescent tags to look at different areas inside the cell that we are interested in… for example we might want to fluorescently tag DNA to see where the DNA is inside your cells!
- Gemma Staite answered on 28 Jun 2012:
  
  I too have used lasers for microscopy, but I don’t use them that often. We have barcode readers which use lasers though, and I use them all the time.
- Ashley Cadby answered on 1 Jul 2012:
  
  We have a lot of lasers in our labs, some of them are ultra violet, blue, green, red, and infra red. I think my favourite ones are the 532nm green ones, they are very pretty. The two I am most scared about are 1.) our continuum laser which is a white light laser and 2.) the Ti:sapphire laser which is red but can be tuned from 400-1000nm.

Question: have you ever used a laser??

Comments