Joseph's Senior Research Project

Today I took a Laser Radiation Protection Course in order to be able to use lasers during my project. My project involves, in short, making holograms, finding some properties of them, and thinking of ways to make it better, and for that, I REALLY need to know how to be safe around lasers.

Some important things I thought all you guys should know:

LASER: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission Radiation

Classes of Lasers

Class 1: Safe (e.g. CD & DVD players, spectrometers)

Class 2: Weak enough that your blink reflex (closing your eyes and turning away) is good enough to be safe (e.g. Barcode Scanners), but can still do damage if you force yourself to bypass the reflex (more about this later)

Class 3a: Can cause damage if looked at for more than a brief exposure, but injuries are uncommon (e.g. laser pointers! [I know that's what you'll were wondering])

Class 3b: Can cause injury, but usually not a skin or fire hazard

Class 4: Severe damage, and is a skin and fire hazard

I'm going to be working with the dangerous stuff (Classes 3b and 4), so I really got to watch out. As a side story, there were a group of high school students that were quite... shall we say unwise. They got their hands on a Class 2 laser, which is typically safe, but they dared each other to see who could look at the Class 2 laser the longest (did I mention that they were st... unwise?). Yup, you probably guessed it (or not), they all had retinal burns. *facepalm*

Back to my project. Starting Monday, I'll be interning at the College of Optical Sciences at the U of A, where I'll be introduced to the lab to where I'll be working and start learning about holograms. Can't wait to start!