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Page 38 of 160 (1595 Questions and Answers)

371. Can you get a tan from an ultraviolet light bulb?

372. Do fluorescent light fixtures emit magnetic fields? If so, would they be intense enough to affect diskette magnetic media?
While fluorescent light fixtures do emit magnetic fields, those fields are far too weak to affect magnetic media. Any electric current produces a magnetic field, even the current flowing through the gas inside a fluorescent tube. However, that field is so weak that it would be difficult to detect. Nearby iron or steel could respond to that weak magnetic field and intensify it, but the field would still be only barely noticeable. The only strongly magnetic component in a fluorescent fixture is its ballast coil. The ballast serves to stabilize the electric discharge in the lamp and relies on a magnetic field to store energy. However, the ballast is carefully shielded and most of its magnetic field remains inside it.

As for affecting diskette magnetic media, that's extraordinarily unlikely. Even if you held a diskette against the ballast, I doubt it would cause any trouble. Modern magnetic recording media have such high coercivities (resistances to magnetization/demagnetizations) that they are only affected by extremely intense fields.

373. Do neon lights have glass that is not colored, but has phosphors that emit a particular color?
A true neon light tube has completely clear (no color, no phosphor) glass surrounding a thin gas of neon atoms. When current runs through that gas, the neon atoms emit red light. In "neon tubes" that emit colors other than red (green, pink, orange, yellow, etc.), there is a layer of phosphor on the inside surface of the glass and mercury vapor inside the tube. These fluorescent tubes probably don't contain any neon at all. You can see the light coming from the phosphor coating. In a true neon tube, you can see the light coming from the gas itself, well inside the glass tube.

374. Does the size of the bulb affect its intensity?

375. How do "forbidden transitions" become less forbidden as pressure builds?

376. How do phosphors change the light from ultraviolet to visible?

377. How does a fluorescent light work?
A fluorescent lamp consists of a gas-filled glass tube with an electrode at each end. This lamp emits light when a current of electrons passes through it from one electrode to the other and excites mercury atoms in the tube's vapor. The electrons are able to leave the electrodes because those electrodes are heated to high temperatures and an electric field, powered by the electric company, propels them through the tube. However, the light that the mercury atoms emit is actually in the ultraviolet, where it can't be seen. To convert this ultraviolet light to visible light, the inside surface of the glass tube is coated with a fluorescent powder. When this fluorescent powder is exposed to ultraviolet light, it absorbs the light energy and reemits some of it as visible light, a process called "fluorescence." The missing light energy is converted to thermal energy, making the tube slightly hot. By carefully selecting the fluorescent powders (called "phosphors"), the manufacturer of the light can tailor the light's coloration. The most common phosphor mixtures these days are warm white, cool white, deluxe warm white, and deluxe cool white.

The only other significant component of the fluorescent lamp is its ballast. This device is needed to control the current flow through the tube. Gas discharges such as the one that occurs inside the lamp are notoriously unstable—they're hard to start and, once they do start, tend to become too intense. To regulate the discharge, the ballast controls the amount of current flowing through the tube. In most older lamps, this control is done by an electromagnetic device called an inductor. An inductor opposes current changes and keeps a relatively constant current flowing through the tube (although that current does stop and reverse directions each time the power line current reverses directions — 120 times a second or 60 full cycles, over and back, in the United States). Some modern fluorescent lamps use electronic ballasts—sophisticated electronic controls that regulate current with the help of transistor-like components.

378. How does an ultraviolet ("black light") fluorescent tube work?
Some ultraviolet fluorescent tubes are simply the mercury discharge tubes (as in a normal fluorescent tube) but without any phosphor coating on the inside of the tube and with a quartz glass tube that transmits 254 nanometer light. In such a bulb, the 254-nanometer light emitted by mercury vapor in a discharge is emitted directly from the tube without being converted into visible light. A filter somewhere in the system absorbs the small amount of visible light emitted by a low-pressure mercury discharge. For the longer wavelength black light used in most applications, other gases that emit lots of 300-400 nanometer light are used. Again, these tubes have no phosphor coatings to convert the ultraviolet light into visible light. One other way to make longer wavelength black light is to use a mercury discharge but to coat the inside of the tube with a phosphor that fluoresces ultraviolet light between 300 and 400 nanometer.

379. How does radiation trapping work?
Each atom has certain wavelengths of light that it is particularly capable of absorbing and emitting. For mercury, that special wavelength is about 254 nanometer (ultraviolet). For sodium, it is about 590 nanometer (orange-yellow). If you send a photon of the right 590 nanometer light at a sodium atom, there is a good chance that that atom will absorb it, hold it for a few billionths of a second, and then reemit it. The newly reemitted light will probably not be traveling in the same direction as before. Now if you have a dense gas of sodium vapor and send in your special photon of light, that photon will find itself bouncing from one sodium atom to another, like the metal ball in a huge pinball game. The photon will eventually emerge from the gas, but not before it has traveled a very long distance and spent a long time in the gas. It was "trapped" in the sodium vapor. This radiation trapping makes it hard for high-pressure gas discharges to emit their special wavelengths because those wavelengths of light become trapped in the gas.

380. Is a neon light actually a mercury/phosphor tube?

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