Before I begin, It's been a few years since I even looked at an optics
problem so don't treat this as gospel by any stretch of the imagination
but......
I would think that you could channel it as long as the optical clarity of
your reflective medium was damn near perfect otherwise your absorption is
going to cause some of your lasers energy to be absorbed by the medium, as
for fibre, I would think that as soon as you started to absorb energy from
the high power laser you would begin to heat the material the fibre is made
of so the same principle would have to apply, just like electrickery down a
conductor I would presume, whatever you feed in is going to be partially
converted to heat/power losses unless you have a perfect superconductor.
I think they commonly use reflectors( read damn highly polished mirrors) and
prisms in the lab set-ups.

Cheers
JJ

----- Original Message -----
From: "rad0" <rad0@ATTBI.COM>
To: <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 12:23 PM
Subject: [ot]: laser question


> 'ok' here's one for you
>
> can you transmit laser energy through a fiber optic cable?
>
> If you have a laser that melts metal, can you channel this type of
> thing through a fiber optic cable and still melt the metal?
>
> Or is there any other way to channel this type of laser?
> mirrors or something else?
>
>
> thanks
>
> --
> http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
> ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.