Supervisor: Dr Brett Patterson
The transversely-excited atmospheric pressure (TEA) nitrogen laser is a pusled-laser emitting in the UV at 337 nm, with pulse-length about 1 ns. Application areas include dissociation of dye molecules, surface preparation and contamination removal, fluorescence excitation, and polymer microstructuring. The aim of this project is to optimise an existing TEA laser set-up and fully characterise the laser in terms of spatial and temporal coherence, beam quality and stability, and power output.