For convenience sake let’s say you have 2 identical lasers, one is blue and one is red. And you shine it on lead (so none of the light leaks through) until the lead doesn’t heat up anymore. Would the temperature change at all between the different color lasers. It doesn’t have to be red or blue, it could be microwave or x ray, just different colors is nessisary.
@toboggonablaze is essentially correct, but let me try explain it in a slightly different way.
Lasers do a bunch of things to basically shoot a stream of photons at something. There’s basically two ways you can affect how much energy comes out of a laser, you can make the stream denser (more photons per second) - called intensity, or you can increase the energy in each photon.
The weird part about photon energy is that higher energy photons are of a different “color”, where red is lower than green, is lower than blue, is lower than gamma rays, etc.
So changing the color of a laser already means you’ve changed how much energy it can output.
Then there’s another part of your question: how lead gets heated up. Different materials respond differently to different types/wavelengths of light, an example you might be familiar with is that glass panes let through visible light, but not the heat from the sun, or that water also is see through, but can easily be microwaved (by microwaves - low frequency light).
Basically, a material can be more or less “translucent” in certain frequencies. I’d like to look lead up for you, but Google isn’t cooperating today. But basically, there are frequencies that lead will be more and less susceptible to.
That’s probably not what you meant with the question, but if that’s the application you want to use the laser for, you might want to take it into consideration.
So, in summary: color is energy, intensity is energy, you can change both independently, so your question doesn’t quite make sense.
Also, different targets will heat differently, also not making it a fair comparison.
Basically, a material can be more or less “translucent” in certain frequencies. I’d like to look lead up for you, but Google isn’t cooperating today. But basically, there are frequencies that lead will be more and less susceptible to.
For macroscopic objects, there really isn’t a single answer. Something as generic as “a plate of lead(oxide)” can be all over the spectrum depending on texture, exact composition, oxidation levels, etc etc. there’s a reason why lab-grade filters and mirrors cost so much money, it’s hard to get a narrow frequency range.
It also rapidly changes as the material heats up, melts, breaks down, reacts with the air, etc.
When you say “they’re identical” what properties between the two lasers do you want to force to match?
Okay, so I don’t know much about lasers at all so I don’t know why making them identical but changing the color doesn’t work. I just want the same amount of light to be produced in the same intensity but different colors
Then, as I understand, both lasers produce beams of the same intensity (photons per area) and with the same cross section area, i.e. the number of emitted photons per unit of time is identical, the blue laser delivers more power than the red one as tobogganablaze already wrote, since blue light (high frequency, short wavelength) photons have higher energy than red light photons (low frequency, long wavelength). And the rest is up to the absorption properties of the material hit by the laser.
The power needed to power the laser, if identical, is what determines the temperature here, not the color.
A thousand watt laser is going to make the lead melt while a 5 watt laser won’t.
Another limiting factor is how fast the lead/target material can dissipate the heat. A 10kg block of lead is going to stay a lot cooler than a 5 gram piece of lead.
The colour of the laser has no influence on the final temperature, at all.
The photons are just transferring energy from a to b. And whether they can do it fast or slow doesn’t really matter. Both blue and red photons are subject to the law of conservation of energy. The amount of energy you put in is the amount of energy you get out.
In reality there is probably a difference in how efficient a blue and red laser diode are, so there are losses. And if one is slower than the other, the target material is losing energy to the surrounding air. And that’s why you’ll get different temperatures.
In an ideal setting with exactly identical lasers, where the only difference is the colour, the end result is also exactly the same.
You misspelled color
Both “color” and “colour” are valid spellings.
cooler
Im in the privileged position where I can say that I was educated to pronounce and write in British English. And while I’m not a native speaker, I’m confident that my knowledge of the English language surpasses most of native speakers in the US, if not 99%. My spell checker is biased for us English.
Now if you excuse me I have to go back to my flat, with my lorry having chips and candy floss in the boot. Do you even elevator bro?