Comment on Does color change how hot a laser can get something?

KidnappedByKitties@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

@toboggonablaze is essentially correct, but let my try explain it in a slightly different way.

Lasers do a bunch of things to basically shoot a stream of photons at something. There’s basically two ways you can affect how much energy comes out of a laser, you can make the stream denser (more photons per second) - called intensity, or you can increase the energy in each photon.

The weird part about photon energy is that higher energy photons are of a different “color”, where red is lower than green, is lower than blue, is lower than gamma rays, etc.

So changing the color of a laser already means you’ve changed how much energy it can output.

Then there’s another part of your question: how lead gets heated up. Different materials respond differently to different types/wavelengths of light, an example you might be familiar with is that glass panes let through visible light, but not the heat from the sun, or that water also is see through, but can easily be microwaved (by microwaves - low frequency light).

Basically, a material can be more or less “translucent” in certain frequencies. I’d like to look lead up for you, but Google isn’t cooperating today. But basically, there are frequencies that lead will be more and less susceptible to.

That’s probably not what you meant with the question, but if that’s the application you want to use the laser for, you might want to take it into consideration.

So, in summary: color is energy, intensity is energy, you can change both independently, so your question doesn’t quite make sense.

Also, different targets will heat differently, also not making it a fair comparison.

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