You’ll shoot your eye out…with a 1MW laser pulse pistol
Fitted with a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser, it fires off a 1 MW blast of infrared light once the capacitors have fully charged. The duration of the laser pulse is somewhere near 100ns, so he was unable to catch it on camera, but its effects are easily visible in whatever medium he has fired upon. The laser can burst balloons, shoot through plastic, and even blow a hole right through a razor blade.
Is there enough impulse to detect any “kick” from firing a laser like this, or do you need something with a few more orders of magnitude? (There was a debate on whether phasers recoiled like pistols or not some time back, so I’m curious.)
The momentum is E/c, and even though this is a 1 MW pulse, the duration is 100 ns, so the energy is 0.1 Joules. Way too small to feel.