
The Copper Vapor Laser - PaulHoule
https://www.copper.org/publications/newsletters/innovations/2001/06/cutting_edge.html
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wbraun
Copper Vapor / Copper Halide lasers have been around for a long time. I was
interested in making one when I was in high school and went to the library at
a local college and photocopied a whole bunch of old books/articles on the
topic. Copper Halide lasers are one of the easiest to build (optically) as
they have really high gain. You can get away with poor reflectivity / poorly
aligned mirrors.

Sam's Laser FAQ has a lot on the topic
[https://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserccb.htm](https://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserccb.htm)

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exabrial
> The CVL produces green and yellow laser light at 510 and 578 nm respectively

Riddle me this: When Intel produces a, say 14nm chip, they're using something
like 190ishnm [SI] laser to strike the image, and they co-developed tech with
IBM to take advantage of interference patterns to get down to a 14nm
lithograph. 190nm into 14nm doesn't seem like an extreme jump, but 510nm laser
to a 20nm hole, [assuming they meant nm not mm per my other comment], how on
earth do you make that jump?? That seems huge.

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xyzzy123
I think they meant 20 micrometer, not 20nm based on the stated width of the
drill bit.

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nimish
The mechanical watch industry would love this as an alternative to DRIE for
creating precision movement parts

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candiodari
DRIE ? My googling magic appears powerless against this acronym ...

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pogden
Deep Reactive Ion Etching should turn up more results. For watchmaking the
application would be bulk micromachining.

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fileoffset
FYI: This article is 18 years old

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exabrial
> A CVL beam machined a 20-mm hole in the tip of the drill.

I could do that with my .45acp at 10yards

