In this video, a scientist is quite proud of his BBO crystal and shows it to the camera. He also treats it with great care.
Guessing the size of things isn’t my strong suit, but I’m guessing this crystal is in the range of 5x2x5mm. I don’t fully understand these listings, but it appears that a grand will get you 5x5x0.2mm. This rock would be several times thicker; whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I’m not qualified to say.
Any idea what this particular crystal cost the university that paid for it?
What I’m finding is prices on the order of $500-$1000 for unmounted BBO crystals in that size range. Thus.
Yes but unless I’m woefully misunderstanding something, all of those have at least one dimension in the nanometers. The rock in my video was at least 2 millimeters in every dimension.
Also, I don’t understand what I’m seeing in the Eksma Optics shop you linked to. I see what to my untrained eye appears to be a lens or something. I assume the crystal proper is not visible to the naked eye but is somehow contained within the lens, or is the lens, for reasons I don’t understand. Looks nothing like the scientist’s rock; what am I missing?
I selected 5x5x2mm for dimensions and it said $535.
Okay, so when you see nanometers listed when you look at listings for optical geegaws, it nearly always refers to the wavelength of the light that is expected to be worked with, not the physical dimensions of the device. In the case of the page I linked to earlier, the dimensions in the chart are all in millimeters. Where it says e.g. “SHG @ 800nm” that means that the crystals are designed for second-harmonic generation of light in the near infrared (SHG is a method of frequency doubling–in this case near infrared goes in, blue comes out).
What is shown in the picture at the Eksma optics site is probably an empty mount showing what the mounted crystal will look like.
Thanks for clearing this up!