Question: How small are lasers I

Padraic Morrissey answered on 6 Feb 2015:

Great question!
There are loads of different lasers that are designed for particular applications. Some lasers are used in DVD players so they need to be small, while others are massive, like the ones used in car manufacturing plants to weld and cut metal. Usually the more powerful a laser is the larger it has to be, because there extra cooling systems are needed to keep it from over heating.

The lasers I work with are for the telecommunications industry, where they used to put light into optical fibre. These lasers don’t have to be super powerful (they won’t cut through metal but could still blind you!) so they can be quite small. Typically, the lasers I use are about 1 mm x 0.005 mm in size… which is much thinner than human a hair! If you look on my profile page you can see some pictures of lasers, although they are so small its actually hard to find them without using a really powerful microscope.