sorry i searched on posts and was not satisfied with the answers i got from it. trust me i have done my research and is seems that the shorter the wavelength the more power can be applied to a phosphorescent material. what i was asking is, with the difficulty of acquiring uv products what should i opt for. what is more important? wave length, volts or watts. i read that i 365nw-400 source can charge a phosphorescent product in 1 minute more than a white led can in 8hrs. i think thats bs. if i have a product that produces 1000 times the power of a uv flashlight, even if only 25% of the power is effectively charging my disc it is still well above the uv light.
WELL......
opcorn:
The thing is, phosphorescent materials react to certain wavelengths. A single 370-400 nanometer photon will excite the material and cause the phosphore...glowy stuff's electrons to increase their excitation state. When the electrons go back to the ground state, they emit photons, which is what you see when it glows. White light is a combination of many photons of many wavelengths.
The special thing about glowy stuff, is that the electrons return to the ground states over a period of time. When you shine a UV light at a white t-shirt, the same thing happens, but only while the UV photons are there to continuosly increase the shirt's electron state. Hence, why a t-shirt doesn't keep glowing when you turn off the light.
So with a UV light, most of the photons you get out of it are in the particularly useful wavelength, whereas a regular flashlight only has a fraction of the useful photons.
Try this experiment. Go into a dark room, no light, and make sure your discs discharge. Now, take the UV light, pointed at the disc, and blink it on and then off. You'll see the disc glow X amount. Now, once it has discharged, do the same with your surefire; Blink it on and then off. You'll notice that the disc isn't glowing as much, or even at all depending on how far away the light was from it.
On a side note, you'll see a difference between glow discs. The discraft ones will charge fast, glow bright, but they fade quickly. My glow wizard takes MUCH longer to charge (I actually put the light to the disc, and run it around it like a paintbrush), but the thing will glow FOREVER...
So what you read about UV in one minute vs white in 8 hrs might technically be true. The number of useful photons in the 1 minute might quantitatively equal 8 hours of white LED, but the material can only take so much charge.
Also, there's a different between incandescent white light, sunlight, and white LEDs. Incandescent and sunlight can be broken up by a prism into a nice wide rainbow. I believe you'll get distinct bands from a white LED, since it's using a voltage to excite a diode into emitting material specific wavelengths of light.
So yeah. Did that make any sense?
