The effects are awesome..

Have you ever wondered what would happen combining these two things?  Well lucky for us this home experimenter did and shared his findings on video.  He tests what happens with the cooling properties of dry ice on his homemade laser. He also walks us through the steps although we would not recommend trying this at home.  Here is an excerpt from the experimenter:

In this video, one of my laser diodes is tested to destruction with an interesting cooling experiment. The experiment was to verify whether or not a larger power output was possible from a “medium” power diode(ML101U29-25) under almost cryogenic temperatures. The diode suffered from a “thermal runaway” in the end, as was determined by the self-increasing current effect. This diode definitely seemed to be outputting over 1W of power, but I cannot say for sure.(I need a laser power meter)

This is really cool. Btw note again do not try this at home or without the supervision of a professional!

One of the commenters has an interesting suggestion:

you should also have dry ice covering all sides.. the top was not cooled at all …. ( the thermal conductivity of the material surrounding the diode is not good. 🙂 nex time submerge it in dry ice and just leave enough space for the beam. or add some water … ( wont hurt the diode ) …

Also in the video his partner says DO NOT have the propane tank in the site of the laser. He agrees 🙂

Here is another experimenter working with a MUCH more powerful laser

Here is more about general laser properties from wikipedia:

Lasers are distinguished from other light sources by their coherence. Spatial coherence is typically expressed through the output being a narrow beam, which is diffraction-limited. Laser beams can be focused to very tiny spots, achieving a very high irradiance, or they can have very low divergence in order to concentrate their power at a great distance.

We hope you enjoy the video and are inspired to be scientific and ask questions as well es experiment safely!