Recent content by norlesh

Well my initial goal is to be able to do aluminium coating of optics - still looking for a reliable number on what pressure is required for this. The upper/lower limit of UHV seems like a good target to shoot for which according to wikipedia starts at 10-7 Pa. As for heating this thing, the...

While recharging a battery would be the most practical way - you may also find it interesting to look into hooking up a flywheel - this is a wheel that the fan connects to with a one way ratchet mechanism and possibly some gearing to obtain faster momentum. The fan starts the flywheel spinning...

I understand mild steel is very bad at out gassing so is never usually considered for hard vacuum applications. But if the decision was constrained by other factors would it be possible to apply a surface treatment or coating to the internal walls of the vessel - am I correct in assuming that as...

10 mm is getting REALLY heavy if things go toward the 1 metre end of the scale. I appreciate your input and will definitely be taking note, unfortunately it still does not answer my original question.

It accepts the whole beam, but the beam will have diverged during its travel (unavoidable due to path length) inside the prism enough that it will interact with the top and bottom - so there is a difference.

I will be using the highest refractive index I can find for the glass, and as for gratings I need to separate and collect the full beam while most of the beam in a grating ends up in the zero-order mode which is not separated. Which leaves me with the original question of whether or not the...

Depending on other parameters, the side the disbursed beam emerges from could be anywhere up to 1 meter (the larger the edge, the better the resolution) - it will be a polychromator for an experiment I'm planning.

Thickness is possibly a more accurate term, my use of height was in relation to the first post where I specified the geometry was laying flat... The thickness would of course be wide enough to accept the full beam (but no thicker) - the objective is to have a very large prism, the frequencies...

No, the angles would be normal like say a 60:60:60 but the height would be much less than the widths of the three sides.

The way I like to think of it (undoubtedly a physicist would correct me) is at every point in space there are the electric (E) and magnetic (B) fields. In the absence of EM radiation E and B together will have approximately zero energy, but when an 'EM wave' passes through a point there is a...

You could get an approximation of the torque you are going to require by winding fishing line around the axle several times then adding hanging weights off the end until the point your structure starts turning comfortably through a full revolution. The weight required (in kilograms) times the...

Could a thin sheet of glass with appropriate edge angles work as a dispersion prism? If the prism were laying flat my thoughts are the light should be contained via TIR in a plane that would remain perpendicular to the top and bottom while said plane dispersed horizontally according to...