Could an Near Infra red radiation be made an ionization radiation if for example passed through a lens of sort

Question

Thank you very much

Answer 1

No, that is not possible. However, a photon can pick up energy from interacting with atoms or more specifically, electrons in their electron shells. But to become ionizing radiation a near infrared photon would have to pick up tens of thousands of times more energy than it started with, and that is just not very likely, not unless a photon interacts with an atom repeatedly, and gains energy from an electron repeatedly. Passing near infrared radiation through a lens does not increase it's energy, it only focuses it.

Answer 2

No.

Answer 3

Most definitely.  The best example is the common pulsed YAG laser that emits at 1.064 microns.  For fairly ordinary pulse lengths and energies, focus this in air and the resulting electric field will ionize the air molecules.

This can happen because the laser is close to a true point source and hence the energy density at the focus is very high.

Answer 4

There's a rule in thermodynamics that says you can't use a lens to create a final temperature that his higher than the source.  Since ionizing frequencies are higher than IR, the answer would appear to be "no", however counter intuitive that may seem.

But let's expand our definition of "lens".  If you get IR sensitive photo cells lined up, and store the energy into a battery, one could create temperatures has high as you want.  If you have arbitrarily large surface area to collect, you can create arbitrarily high temperatures, because you have as much power as you want.

So, no, and yes.