This is the resonator. The machine generates the laser-light here. Imagine that one end of a more-meter long glass pipe is closed by a 100% mirror (called closing or fully reflecting mirror), and the other end is closed by semi-resistant mirror (called opening or partially reflecting mirror).
The whorled glass tube is filled with a special gas, which contains mostly CO2. The gas is excited by high frequency. This gas makes the quick light between the opening and the closing mirrors stronger, and a part of the light – as laser light - leaves the resonator through the opening mirror.
Because of the large space it would need, this more-meter long tube is folded with the help of mirrors. The frequency of the given light is in the far infrared domain (10.6um), whose wavelength is longer than that of visible light (400-700 nm) or (0.4-0.7um), and the less sensitive cameras are also unable to recognise it.
The laser cluster, whose diameter is about 3 cm-s, was born in the resonator. It is widened up to about 15 cm diameter by the optics. It has the wider diameter, the less is the divergence.
The grown diametric laser cluster gets to the sheet we want to cut with the help of standing and moving mirrors. The laser light, leaving the resonator, has linear polarization. But it is made circularly polarized before reaching the cutting-head. It ensures us that the quality of the cutting is right in its each direction.
After that the still wide laser cluster gets into the cutting head with the help of mirrors too. Here it is focused to about 0.2mm-s and conducted onto the surface of work. The head follows the sheet automatically with the distance of some decimal millimetres. The pointed laser light has already had so much energy that it melts the metal. The material, left after melting, is blown out by the cutter-gas, which can be oxygen or nitrogen. The gap after cutting is also about 0.2 mm-s thick, however, it depends on the material of the sheet we want to cut, on its quality and thickness.
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