The Copper Vapor Laser

Copper Vapor / Copper Halide lasers have been around for a long time. I was interested in making one when I was in high school and went to the library at a local college and photocopied a whole bunch of old books/articles on the topic. Copper Halide lasers are one of the easiest to build (optically) as they have really high gain. You can get away with poor reflectivity / poorly aligned mirrors.

Sam's Laser FAQ has a lot on the topic https://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserccb.htm

> The CVL produces green and yellow laser light at 510 and 578 nm respectively

Riddle me this: When Intel produces a, say 14nm chip, they're using something like 190ishnm [SI] laser to strike the image, and they co-developed tech with IBM to take advantage of interference patterns to get down to a 14nm lithograph. 190nm into 14nm doesn't seem like an extreme jump, but 510nm laser to a 20nm hole, [assuming they meant nm not mm per my other comment], how on earth do you make that jump?? That seems huge.

The mechanical watch industry would love this as an alternative to DRIE for creating precision movement parts

FYI: This article is 18 years old

> A CVL beam machined a 20-mm hole in the tip of the drill.

I could do that with my .45acp at 10yards