Craig Johnson had a personal tragedy in spring 2022 and since had trouble updating and maintaining his website, although as of 11/25/2023 he is back in business. Some links to there use the Wayback Machine starting 12/26/2022.
Red laser pointers are cheap - some around $5 and a few for even $1 - and are now the way to go if you just want a laser to play with. Update 1/3/2019: Green and violet laser pointers have been available as low as about $30 since 2010, and bluish green and blue ones have recently become available.
Laser diodes are often fussy. The junction or main light-emitting working part of a typical laser diode is about the size of a bacterium and can overheat or get fried by a strong optical frequency electric field within a microsecond if its limits, including its optical output limit, are exceeded. Even unnoticeable amounts of static electricity can cause damage.
The light-emitting area of a laser diode typically emits more light than a similar area of the surface of the sun. It should be understandable that things can easily go wrong.
Yes, some laser diodes have survived worse than looking at them the wrong way. Some are better-built and/or more conservatively rated than others. You may get lucky and be able to just throw something together and have it work. Maybe, maybe not...
If you already have a laser diode that you can't return, and you want to push your luck, then go to Sam Goldwasser's laser FAQ (see links below or jump in here). Good luck!
This can be largely fixed by placing a convex lens in front of the diode
laser, with a distance nearly equal to the lens's focal length. This reforms
the beam, giving it a new, wider initial width with a correspondingly lower
divergence. You will have to adjust the focus (or lens distance) yourself
for best results.
Once you do this, you might wonder what happens with the beam, since the
beam from a typical laser diode is not round, but oblong. This occurs
because the light emitting part of the laser diode is oblong. At best, the
wider dimension of the beam will diverge less than the narrower dimension.
The best to be expected from compact lenses around a centimeter in diameter
is a beam with initial dimensions (upon leaving the lens) of nearly 1
centimeter in the wider dimension, by a couple or a few millimeters in the
narrower dimension. The wider dimension will expand by a millimeter every
ten meters or so, while the narrower dimension of the beam will expand by a
millimeter every couple or few meters. The divergence may even be greater
than this if the lens is of poor quality or not exactly at the optimum
distance from the laser diode, or if the beam exits the lens with smaller
dimensions than just mentioned above.
The divergence may not be apparent within a few meters of the lens, if the
"waist" of the beam occurs at that point. The beam "waist" is a region that
sometimes occurs if the lens is trying to make the beam converge at the same
rate that the wave nature of light is trying to make the beam diverge. At
long distances, the beam *will* diverge, at best, at a rate in milliradians
roughly inverse to its initial width in millimeters.
To get less divergence, you need more complex optics or a He-Ne laser, which
has a very close-to-ideal round beam. Although a He-Ne laser's beam is
fairly narrow and would diverge roughly by a millimeter every meter, this
can easily be "fixed". Simply fire the He-Ne through a telescope, into the
eyepiece and out the other end. If the telescope is optimally focused, the beam
will exit the front of the telescope with a diameter magnified by the telescope's
magnification. (Try not to magnify the beam beyond the diameter of any lens
it has to go through.) With luck, you could get the beam to have an extremely
low divergence of around a millimeter every several 10s or even roughly every
100 meters.
Diode lasers generally don't have ideal beam characteristics, but they are fairly easy to focus to the degree that the beam does not widen by more than a millimeter or two per meter. Most diode laser "pointers" and collimated diode laser modules should achieve this.
Wavelength nm, color, type Photopic function
---------------------------------------------------------
405 violet diode laser .0047
413.1 A violet (not main) Kr laser wavelength .0099
441.6 He-Cd violetish blue .0394
445 violetish blue diode laser .0424
450 new deep blue diode laser .0468
458 deep blue DPSS .0564
460 rare blue diode laser .060
473 turquoise blue DPSS .104
488 main green-blue argon wavelength .191
505 rare new blue-green diode laser .407
510 rare new bluish green diode laser .503
515 new emerald green diode laser .608
520 new green diode laser .710
525 rare new green diode laser .793
532 green DPSS .885
543.5 green He-Ne .974
556 yellowish green DPSS laser .99985
561 yellow-green DPSS laser .9926
568.2 chartreuse (not main) Kr laser wavelength .963
589.2 "sodium yellow" dye laser .767
593.5 orange-yellow DPSS .714
594.1 orange-yellow He-Ne .706
612 red-orange He-Ne .478
632.8 red common He-Ne .237
635 less-common red diode laser .217
647.1 red krypton laser .124
650 common low cost red diode laser .107
660 many high power red diode lasers .061
671 deep red DPSS .03
694.3 ruby laser .006
785 old CD player laser diodes .000011 nominally infrared
808 pump laser diodes for DPSS lasers .0000022 nominally infrared
946 Nd DPSS doublable to 473nm blue 1.5*10^-10 nominally infrared
1064 Nd lasers including Nd:YAG lasers 4 * 10^-14
(invisible at any level that is eye-safe, even if for only 1 second)
NOTE: Figures for wavelengths longer than 780 nm are extrapolated.Also note that wavelengths 710 to lower 800s of nanometers are invisible in foreseeable situations when at borderline-eyesafe levels, and longer near-infrared wavelengths around/over 820 nm can be dangerous due to being often unnoticed, and sometimes completely invisible.
Light output in lumens is the photopic function of the wavelength, times the output power in milliwatts, times .693.
Sometimes scattering by dust is more significant, and that is essentially independent of wavelength. However, many people want lasers whose beams are visible from the side in clean air.
Since a laser beam shows a visible path mainly in dark rooms or outdoors at night, perceived brightness of the beam's trace through air depends mainly on scotopic vision. This is usually true even when the color of the beam path is visible - in which case "mesopic vision" is operating. Mesopic vision is a combination of photopic and scotopic vision, with photopic vision providing a sensation of color and scotopic vision providing most of the sensation of seeing light.
So, a reasonable predictor of visibility of the beam's path through clean air is output power times the scotopic function, divided by wavelength to the 4th power.
Following is a table of scotopic function divided by wavelength to the 4th power, normalized to have maximum value of 1, for some common laser wavelengths (6.324E10 times scotopic function divided by wavelength^4), along with an alternative.
The alternative is normalized (.64 * normalized scotopic_function/wavelength^4, +.16 * scotopic function, + .16 * normalized photopic_function/wavelength^4, +.04* photopic function). I have done only very limited testing of this for correlating well with beam path visibility in fairly clean air in viewing conditions that are dim but bright enough to see the color of the laser light.
ADDED 8/12/2023: My ALT is based on assumptions that Rayleigh scattering matters 4 times as much as Mie scattering does and that scotopic vision matters 4 times as much photopic vision does for seeing paths of laser beams in dark lighting conditions, especially with peripheral vision. The formula for my ALT is, using wavelength in nm:
1.127772*(40474752000*scotopic_function/wavelength^4 + .16*scotopic_function +
14256864000*photopic_function/wavelength^4 + .04*photopic_function)
Wavelength nm, color, type Norm. V'/WL^4 ALT. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 405 violet diode laser .0435 .0378 413.1 A violet (not main) Kr laser wavelength .108 .093 441.6 He-Cd violetish blue .580 .492 445 violetish blue diode laser .634 .548 450 new deep blue diode laser .701 .608 458 deep blue DPSS .781 .688 460 rare blue diode laser .801 .705 473 turquoise-blue DPSS .897 .814 488 main green-blue argon wavelength .986 .934 505 rare new blue-green diode laser .970 .999 510 rare new bluish green diode laser .921 .994 515 new emerald green diode laser .877 .974 520 new green diode laser .865 .940 525 rare new green diode laser .8325 .891 532 green DPSS .617 .804 543.5 green He-Ne .428 .638 556 yellowish green DPSS laser .256 .468 561 yellow-green DPSS laser .201 .403 568.2 chartreuse (not main) Kr laser wavelength .138 .332 589.2 "sodium yellow" dye laser .036 .18 593.5 orange-yellow DPSS .0264 .153 594.1 orange-yellow He-Ne .0253 .15 612 red-orange He-Ne .0062 .0838 632.8 red common He-Ne .00105 .0357 635 less-common red diode laser .00087 .0323 647.1 red krypton laser .000307 .0165 650 common low cost red diode laser .00024 .0148 660 many high power red diode lasers .000104 .0081 671 deep red DPSS .0000423 .0037 694.3 ruby laser .0000072 .0007Since photopic vision and scattering by dust will exist to a small extent, visibility of the beam path will be greater for longer wavelengths and less for shorter wavelengths than the "norm" column in the above chart indicates.
UPDATE 9/1/2018: 488 nm and 505 nm diode laser pointers are now
available. 488 nm is usually considered a greenish shade of blue, and is also
the main (sometimes only) wavelength of most argon lasers. 505 nm is usually
considered a bluish shade of green. Both wavelengths are favorable for
visibility of the paths of their beams going through air. Craig Johnson reviews
these:
A 488 nm one
Another 488 nm one (new link
9/27/2023)
A 505 nm one
CAUTION - power output of the units tested by Craig Johnson was measured or otherwise determined mostly as around 40-70 mW despite statements of two of these producing 5 mW.
UPDATE 11/27/2013: 515 nm emerald green diode lasers are now available. Craig Johnson reviews one here.
As of late September 2010, diode lasers are only available in wavelengths in the infrared, red and orange-red range, and in the blue, violet and near-UV range.
Commercially available laser pointers whose output is a laser diode wavelength as of this time have only been red or violet, with the exception of a recent slightly violetish blue one. Lower cost red diode laser pointers have had wavelength mainly close to 645-650 nm.
Laser pointers of other colors using DPSS technology have been available for several years, though they cost more than red diode laser pointers.
The most common and least expensive non-red laser pointers are 532 nm green DPSS ones. (Exception: As of summer 2010, violet laser pointers are becoming less expensive than green ones, but violet ones are still less widely available than green ones.) As of September 2010, green laser pointers generally cost near or over $20, mostly well above $20.
UPDATE 3/26/2009: Radio Shack now sells a green laser pointer, with catalog number 63-132. Craig Johnson reviews it here. (This location is not at the Wayback Machine.)
More expensive still, generally costing at least a few hundred dollars, are "yellow" (very orangish shade of yellow) 593.5 nm DPSS laser pointers and 473 nm blue ones (color is a "turquoise" cyanish shade of blue).
UPDATE 9/28/2023:Yellow-green DPSS lasers with wavelength of 561 nm are now available. Craig Johnson reviews one of these here.
Other DPSS wavelengths/colors such as 458 nm deep blue are known, but are less easily achieved than 473 nm blue, 532 nm green, and 593.5 nm orangish yellow.
He-Ne laser pointers have been known to be marketed, as far as I know only in 632.8 nm red, and only before red diode laser pointers became easily available at low prices.
UPDATE 6/23/2007: Violet diode laser pointers are starting to become available at moderate prices. One online supplier is dinodirect.com, who refers to these as blue lasers because they use laser diodes intended for "Blu-Ray" players.
Craig Johnson reviews several violet laser pointers in the laser section of his LED Museum website.
WARNING - Many violet laser pointers have output power well above 5 milliwatts, sometimes around 50 milliwatts. Some of these are said to be and labelled as 5 mW laser pointers. These can cause permanent eye damage faster than a human can blink. DO NOT SHINE LASERS NEAR OR OVER 5 MILLIWATTS INTO YOUR EYES OR ANYONE ELSE'S EYES FOR EVEN A FRACTION OF A SECOND! Lasers well over 5 milliwatts can also have hazards of the beam being reflected by shiny objects. The beam can be very dangerous to eyes without appearing very bright because human vision has low sensitivity to the typically 405 nm wavelength of violet laser pointers. Please read my warnings for Class IIIb and Class IV lasers.
Update 9/14/2010: 445 nm cordless handheld lasers are now becoming available. See below here.
UPDATE 12/27/2004 - I got a 4 mW 532 nm "greenie"! (green laser using frequency-doubled neodymium laser wavelength produced by a rod/crystal "pumped" by an infrared laser diode) It is one that I got from Roithner Laser with the catalog number GPL-105.
According to Roithner, the output power of this item can be anywhere from 2 to 5 mW, and according to my tests mine produces slightly over 4 mW.
It is noticeably brighter than the cheap 645 nm red ones. 4 mW of 532 nm theoretically looks about 5 times as bright as 5 mW of 645 nm and about 3 times as bright as 5 mW of 632.8 nm! Even if you get one that produces only 2 mW, it should outshine any 5 mW red laser of any common type.
As for the color, it usually looks not quite a deep pure green but a very slightly yellowish green, sort of "between pure green and lime green". It is slightly less yellowish than the green line of mercury. If you look at a CD reflecting the light of a compact fluorescent lamp and see a bright green band among the colored bands, a 532 nm laser has a shade of green slightly less yellowish than that but still yellowish in comparison to "emerald green".
The beam of my "greenie" is slightly visible when viewed from the side in a dark room. I did not see this effect with a 5 mW 645 nm red laser.
The beam quality of my 532 nm green laser pointer was much better than that of any cheap red laser pointer that I ever tested, but was slightly worse than that of a He-Ne laser.
Look for more on green and other laser pointers including dangerous high power ones in the Craig Johnson links towards the bottom of the Links section below.
UPDATE - Craig Johnson has a page on one that produced 190 milliwatts! This is an extremely dangerous one that can easily cause permanent eye damage in as little as a few milliseconds. If the beam reflects from shiny glass, plastic or other shiny smooth objects, it can be powerful enough to possibly cause permanent eye damage faster than one can blink! It even has a slight burning capability!
However, I believe that orange, yellow and green lasers should be no more dangerous and at least a little safer than red ones of the same brightness as opposed to the same power. This is because a red laser needs more power to match the brightness of an orange, yellow or green laser.
If you want to try blocking any infrared output yourself, use a "dielectric interference" bandpass filter for the wavelength that you want to use. Too many other filter types pass the infrared wavelengths in question, including many dichroic filters, nearly enough all stage lighting filter gels, and most to nearly all colored transparent acrylic sheets such as colored "Plexiglas" & "Lucite".
DO NOT STARE INTO A DPSS LASER POINTER WITH VISIBLE OUTPUT ATTENUATED BY A FILTER UNLESS INFRARED CONTENT IS KNOWN TO NOT EXIST AT AN EYE-HAZARDOUS LEVEL!
1064 nm and longer wavelengths of infrared are widely considered completely invisible at any eye-safe level. Do not expect to see it through a filter that attenuates the visible output, although safely seeing a dim red glow for other reasons (pumping diode output or weak fluorescence caused by the visible beam) is possible.
You might have noticed that supposedly infrared wavelengths slightly over 700 nanometers are not completely invisible. In fact, wavelengths around 800, even 900 nanometers are very slightly visible. However, one should be cautious with visible quantities of light in the 800-plus nanometer range, since large quantities of light that could be hazardous to the eye might be involved in order for such light to be easily visible.
445 nanometers appears to most people as a very deep pure blue or as a violet-blue, depending on intensity and viewing conditions.
Output power of these is usually very high - typically a few hundred miliwatts to over 1 watt, and over 2 watts has been achieved. When a narrow laser beam has .5 watt or more of laser radiation, the laser is a Class IV one, the highest classification.
MAJOR UPDATE 9/28/2010 - Craig Johnson reviews one of these here.
That particular one comes with safety goggles. Use them.
If you get a high power 445 nm laser without goggles, get appropriate goggles. Yellow UV-blocking safety glasses such as ones available at hardware stores or included with many fluorescent leak detection kits are better than none at all, but proper laser goggles are better. One should use goggles that block stray reflected beams that could hit one's eyes from any angle. Rubber-sided welding goggles with the dark green glass replaced with yellow or orange "plexiglas" or similar acrylic are likely to be OK - if tested by an expert to actually work here.
Avoid more than the briefest exposure of a spot on safety goggles to a high power laser beam. The beam may burn, melt or crack the filter material, possibly in less than a second.
There is extreme danger of causing permanent eye damage in as little as a few to several milliseconds if such a beam enters the eye. Stray reflections have significant risk of causing permanent eye damage faster than one can blink. .5 watt or more in a narrow beam can easily cause burns and can start fires. In fact, .19 watt or more in a narrow beam has some ability to start fires and can somewhat easily cause burns.
A laser beam of power around 1 watt, directly entering the eye, may cause a blood vessel in the retina to burst faster than one can react, resulting in bleeding inside the eye. This is obviously a very serious eye injury. Furthermore, a retinal nerve may get cooked within a fraction of a second, which would cause permanent serious vision loss.
Please read some legal stuff on Class IIIb and IV lasers.
Furthermore, even looking at the spot that is formed when a Class IV laser beam hits a white surface or other diffusely reflecting surface can be hazardous. If a narrow 1 watt laser beam hits a perfectly white surface, viewing the spot straight-on from 4.5 inches away results in eye exposure of approx. 2.5 mW per square centimeter, which is borderline between Class II and Class IIIa for laser radiation coming from a point but not in a narrow beam. This could result in permanent eye damage in about a second if a focused image of the spot is formed on the retina and the pupil is fully dilated. Even at greater distances and with less dilated pupils, the spot is still not safe to stare at. Such a spot would expose one to 1 microwatt per square centimeter from a distance of 5.6 meters, approx. 18.5 feet. This is the borderline between Class I and Class II for laser radiation coming from a point on a diffuse surface.
One thing to keep in mind is that this wavelength is often considered more dangerous to eyes than most other visible wavelengths. The danger of permanent eye damage may be even greater than I mentioned above.
Without collimating optics, the beam from these laser diodes has been mentioned as approximately 7 by 16 degrees. If the beam is a uniform ellipse, then 1 watt in such a beam would have an intensity of 37 watts per steradian. However, this 7 by 16 degree beam is not uniform and the center of the beam likely has an intensity roughly twice that, or roughly 74 watts per steradian. This works out to 12.5 mW per square centimeter at 77 centimeters away (give or take). This is the threshold of Class IIIb intensity for laser radiation coming from a point but not in a narrow beam. This is approximately (give or take) the threshold of being able to cause permanent eye damage faster than one can react if one's pupils are fully dilated. Obviously, even without collimating optics, these laser diodes are extremely dangerous to look into when they are producing laser radiation.
One eBay seller of these laser diodes has mentioned that one that he was selling produces 7 milliwatts of radiation even when operated at a little less than laser threshold. One thing about laser diodes is that when operated below laser threshold, their output takes a path similar to that taken by their laser radiation when they are lasing. A pointer producing a narrow beam from one of these operated below laser threshold can produce a non-laser beam of 5 milliwatts or more and having the same eye hazards as a laser beam of the same power - which would be a Class IIIb one.
These are mentioned in Sam Goldwasser's Laser FAQ here.
Don Klipstein's mirror copy at donklipstein.com is at
http://donklipstein.com/lasersam.html
(Copy and paste this into a browser. I removed the live link to get less spam
about linked dead links.)
Some GIFs and some other files are "cleaned up" for slightly faster download.
Updated on 9/1/2009 to a "later V. 9.10" that had updating on 8/15/2009, a
few of many bad links fixed or removed 1/28/2017 - 4/20/2022.
The official copy at the University of Pennsylvania, V. 19.80 as of 10/17/2019 through 4/20/2021, was found to have become unavailable where it was at http://repairfaq.cis.upenn.edu/sam/lasersam.htm sometime between 4/20/2021 and 9/3/2022.
Official copy at repairfaq.org. V. 19.80 as of 10/17/2019 through 8/12/2023.
Link to the v. 13.00 official copy at Drexel removed 12/15/2018 after being found unavailable on and since 5/23/2014.
The whole thing including .GIF, .PDF, .JPG files, etc. in the Laser FAQ zip file. Official version 19.80, size ~160 meg as of 8/12/2023.
The laser section of the table of contents of Craig Johnson's main page.
Also check into:
Craig Johnson's "What's New" Page. Updated 11/27/2023.
UPDATE 6/23/2007! Craig Johnson's page on an EXTREMELY DANGEROUS Class IV 2-watt ~445 nm deep blue portable laser! New page 11/8/2013, updated 11/28/2018.
He reviews many other green ones.
UPDATE 10/13/2004: - Craig Johnson's page on orange-yellow 593.5 nm DPSS laser pointers!
UPDATE 11/21/2023: - a newer page by Craig Johnson on an orange-yellow 593.5 nm DPSS laser.
UPDATE 11/11/2023: - a page by Craig Johnson on a yellow-green 561 nm DPSS laser.
UPDATE 10/19/2023: - a page by Craig Johnson on a green-blue diode laser.
UPDATE 9/8/2012 ("born" in mid-2005): - Craig Johnson's page on a blue 473 nm DPSS laser pointer!
UPDATE 11/2/2023: - a newer page by Craig Johnson on a violet 405 nm diode laser.
Craig Johnson's Main Page (mostly LEDs and flashlights rather than lasers). (Known to be updated 3/11/2021 with a newly added laser.
DANGER - the 15 mW and especially the higher power
lasers can cause permanent eye damage faster than a human can react!
Glass objects, shiny plastic objects and many other shiny objects, even ones
that are not metallized, can produce reflected beams of the 190 mW unit that
are strong enough to cause permanent eye damage faster than one can react!
Use of lasers 5 mW or more is regulated in the USA and forbidden by law in
public places in some areas (check state and local laws)! Please read my
section on legal stuff about Class IIIb lasers.
M. Csele's Homebuilt Lasers Page. Updated 8/16/2012.
Homemade
TEA (Transverse Electrode Atmospheric) Laser at Sparkbangbuzz!
This is a variation of a nitrogen laser. The lasing medium is air at
atmospheric pressure! No mirrors are needed!
The beam is not a true coherent laser beam, but it is reasonably narrow and
the radiation is actually laser radiation.
CAUTION - High voltage is required, and the laser beam is invisible ultraviolet. Also, these lasers involve spark gaps that produce nitrogen oxides and ozone, possibly in quantities unhealthful to breathe for more than a few minutes - you may need good ventillation if you operate such a laser for more than a few minutes! The sparking can also be very loud!
WARNING - Transverse electrode nitrogen lasers tend to be Class IIIb lasers even if the output power is less than 1 milliwatt. The main reason is invisibility of the beam. Please read my legal warnings about Class IIIb lasers.
These are a subset of ultraviolet nitrogen lasers.
Although these are reality now, there has been fiction proposing ability to build these around 1800 or maybe even in the 1700s.
Please read this fiction about such a laser being so easy to build that it is described in fiction of the Victorian times in an obvious link from here.
UPDATE 12/27/2000 - I tried hacking some cheap bullet style laser pointers as suggested by Craig Johnson. I have been getting some amazing solar cell readings on one of these hack jobs indicating at least 6.9 milliwatts absolutely worst case of consistently reproducible readings, and more likely 7.3 mW! Your mileage may and probably will vary but 6.9-plus mW is known achieved without doing anything really extreme! All you need to do is get some spares of the right bullet style laser pointer, and then not get in trouble! :)
Actual solar cell readings were 3.6 mA easily consistently reproduced and occaisionally 3.8 mA under favorable circumstances. The laser was a good foot or two away from the solar cell to rule out most of any radiation not in the laser beam. The wavelength seemed to be 648 nm and was nominally 650.
UPDATE - try removing the bullet tip "plain lens" for more output since this seems to catch and block a small portion of the beam. All milliwatt figures in this section are for with this tip removed from the pointer.
UPDATE 1/2/2001:
CAUTION - One of my "better" samples of this pointer with the usual three batteries and with the bullet tip removed hit 5.4 mW with fresh, non-tired batteries. This power level sagged to 4.4 mW in about a minute. But let it be known that just by removing the bullet tip makes some of these pointers sometimes slightly exceed the 5 mW limit of Class IIIA. Use with caution. Lasers over 5 mW are in a legal class of definitely not a toy - serious federal regulations apply and serious state/local laws may apply.
UPDATE 1/2/2001 - My pointer with 4 batteries managed 9.2 mW for a few seconds with well-rested batteries, sagging to 7.2 mW within a minute as the batteries got tired.
NOW FOR RESULTS OF MORE ADVENTUROUS HACKING! (1/2/2001)
I tried attaching clip leads to the spring and the case of one of these pointers. This went to a variable voltage DC power supply. I cranked it up to 4.9 volts, which was the highest I dared to go.
Results - power output was 10.6 mW, but this sagged to 10.2 mW within a minute as the laser diode heated up.
WARNING - 10-plus mW has a significant risk of causing permanent eye damage faster than one can blink or react if the beam enters someone's eye. A 10 mW laser is definitely not a toy!
WARNING - Such abuse may ruin the laser pointer. The laser diode may degrade within minutes, possibly within a minute from overheating. In addition, thermal stress may break things in the laser diode assembly. There is also a threshold of instant damage ("catastrophic optical damage" occurring in less than a microsecond) which may be somewhere around 10 milliwatts of laser output power.
CAUTION - non-regulated power supplies may have the voltage change significantly between an unloaded condition and a loaded condition. If the voltage with a light load is safe, the no-load voltage may charge up a capacitor in the supply past the threshold of a rapid damage mode! I recommend attaching a light bulb that draws 75-300 mA to the output of any unregulated supply to guard against the voltage rising past some critical level when you release the button on the laser pointer.
CAUTION - if you remove the diode assembly from the pointer, beware that any metal part of the diode assembly that the laser diode chip is attached to may need to be pressed against a larger piece of heat-conductive metal to keep the laser diode from overheating.
This modification is sometimes known as the "pot mod". The pushbutton switch cap can be popped off with a sharp knife or a utility knife blade. This exposes a very small potentiometer or "pot" that can be turned with a very small screwdriver. Turning it counterclockwise (to the left) increases output power.
Do not turn the pot all the way up - it is recommended to at least back it down a little, otherwise the wiper of the pot may fail to make contact.
It may be a good idea to back the pot down enough to get somewhat noticeably less than maximum possible output, so that current flowing through the pump diode is limited by the circuitry rather than by resistance of the batteries. One should also verify that current draw of this laser is less than 500 milliamps, preferably less than 400 milliamps - and beware of ammeters having enough resistance to have combination of ammeter and battery resistance being the limiting factor.
Adjusting the pot with the laser on can short the pot and a resistor in series with one of the pot's leads, resulting in extreme output and possibly damaging the pump diode.
This modification can achieve 15-plus milliwatts of output. Adjusting the pot for maximum possible output can achieve output of 20-plus milliwatts, sometimes over 30 milliwatts. I would do this modification conservatively to achieve longer life of the pump diode.
More extreme modifications are known, such as replacing resistors and placing a short from the wiper of the pot to the positive battery connection. Output as high as 100 milliwatts has been achieved with such extreme modifications. However, life of the pump diode is likely to be significantly shortened, especially if current draw exceeds 500 milliamps.
DANGERS AND WARNINGS!
1. Boosting output past 5 milliwatts makes this laser a Class IIIb one, subject to serious laws and regulations, as well as serious policies at many workplaces and most schools, colleges and universities. USA regulations for Class IIIb lasers include appropriate labelling, and an emission indicator, a key switch, a turn-on delay, and generally to not use such lasers in public with some exceptions.
Please read my stuff on Class IIIb and IV lasers.
2. If a green laser beam much over 5 milliwatts enters one's eye, there is a significant chance that permanent eye damage will occur faster than one can react or blink. If the beam power involved is around or over 15 milliwatts, then this will *probably* cause permanent eye damage.
After what I say in the above disclaimers, as best as I know the main USA Federal regulations affecting lasers are 21 CFR 1040.10 and 21 CFR 1040.11.
It appears to me likely that the USA's FAA imposes some regulation upon at least some lasers being fired into the sky. And OSHA probably has some regulations on use of lasers in workplaces.
There is also Federal legislation affecting lasers. One example is a Federal law against firing lasers at flying aircraft. As far as I know, that law has no exemptions for lasers that can be rightfully fired into the sky, or for ones of output power low enough to not be dangerous. The penalties are very severe.
Many other countries have laws against firing lasers at flying aircraft, with penalty of prison terms more than a year. Canada has a law against directing a bright light beam at aircraft if it could endanger the aircraft or its occupants, even if the bright light is not a laser. The UK has a law specifying a fine up to 2500 pounds for merely dazzling a pilot with a laser.
At least some laws consider aircraft to be "in flight" starting when all doors are closed to embarkment or the aircraft starts moving, and ending when the aircraft has stopped moving and has a door opened for disembarkment.
There are also state and local laws. For example, it is illegal for minors to posess laser pointers in New York City and some localities in Illinois. It is illegal for students or persons of student age to posess laser pointers in kindergarten, elementary, junior high and high schools in California or New York City. There are other places with laws prohbiting, restricting, or regulating posession or usage of lasers in public schools, or schools in general. Many locations have laws specifically against harassing people with lasers or laser pointers.
Laws are different in countries other than the USA. In the USA, laser pointers are legal to retail-market if they are visible and have total output power under 5 mW. But in the United Kingdom and Australia, these have to be under 1 mW.
It is illegal to posess laser pointers in New South Wales, Australia.
Class IIIb lasers include visible lasers producing 5 to 499 milliwatts in a narrow beam. Class IV lasers include ones producing half a watt or more in a narrow beam. The main reason these are regulated is because 5 milliwatts or more being focused into a single spot of the retina of the eye may cause permanent visual damage faster than a human can react.
Furthermore, for most UV and IR wavelengths, there is no such thing in 21 CFR 1040.10 as Class II or Class IIIa. Lasers producing beams of invisible wavelengths (defined as outside the range of 400 - 710 nm) are Class IIIb when they achieve power exceeding the upper limit of Class I. This includes narrow-beam-producing nitrogen lasers even if the beam is not coherent.
Some laser laws and regulations are here at laserpointersafety.com. It is generally not legally permissible in USA to operate Class IIIb or IV lasers where anyone other than the laser operator is at risk of being exposed to the beam, especially in terms of eye exposure. It is generally considered to be illegal in USA to operate a Class IIIb or Class IV laser in public outside the frameworks permitted by 21 CFR 1040.10 and 21 CFR 1040.11.
Norway and Sweden regulate posession and use of lasers over 5 mW.
These regulations do apply to workplaces. Schools are workplaces. Schools and workplaces often have their own rules and/or guidelines concerning operation of lasers, and they are often strict. Various schools and workplaces can have various plans (or lack thereof) for complying with 21 CFR 1040.10 and .11 and whatever OSHA requires for operation of lasers in workplaces. They may have stricter or made-up-on-the-spot rules to satisfy their liability concerns, whether valid or not.
If you want to bring a laser into your school, especially if it is a Class IIIb or IV one, please negotiate with appropriate persons in your school in advance, such as a science teacher, preferably a physics teacher. Please give your science teacher sufficient time in advance to get that worked out with the school's management.
You may be restricted to bringing in your homebrew transverse electrode atmospheric nitrogen laser without its power supply. There is a slight chance you can get it to fire a pulse of a beam from static electricity and within Class I limits, though your school may not allow even that degree of actually operating it.
And if your school allows you to bring in and operate laser pointers, please avoid ones of class IIIb or IV.