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After viewing this: My Homemade 40W Laser Shotgun

Will the initial 40W power of the diodes beams be roughly transferred to the targeted surface where the 8 beams are focused, or will there be a power loss due to some kind of interferences where the beams overlap?

Maxime Pacary
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    I am going to violate some community guidelines here and make a very pointy comment: I would worry less about the question of the efficiency of the energy transfer by the beams as the mental state of the person who builds such dangerous contraptions. Physicists are proud of their safety habits and we do not, neither as individuals or as a community support the abuse of physical technology for the construction of outright dangerous devices without any utility. – CuriousOne Jun 11 '15 at 07:09
  • Yes, I think as well that this kind of device is dangerous and useless. Just for my culture/knowledge/curiosity I would like to know if interferences may affect power or not. After some searches, looks like energy is conserved : http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/131949/interference-and-energy-question-here http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/7707/energy-conservation-and-interference – Maxime Pacary Jun 11 '15 at 20:34

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If energy is lost, it must go somewhere. So, there won't be any "interference" where the beams overlap which saps the power. Unless, and this does happen, the lasers are powerful enough to ionize the air, in which case the light is blocked at that point and converted to heat, which will never make it to the surface. See this article on laser-induced breakdown.

I doubt the contraption in question has the power-density to do this, though.

Daniel Griscom
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  • I suppose that this is based on "law of conservation of energy" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy ? – Maxime Pacary Jun 14 '15 at 21:06