History Of Laser

As stated, a laser is a device that creates light through an optical amplification process that is based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The term “laser” means “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” which is an abbreviation.

Who Invented Lasers:

It was at Hughes Research Lab that Theodore Maiman invented the world’s first functional laser in 1960. His article outlining the functioning of the first laser was published in Nature three months later.

History of Lasers:

The idea of the laser was primarily proposed by Albert Einstein in the year 1916, the laser is an extension of his theory that, given the right conditions, atoms may spontaneously discharge surplus energy in the form of light, or that they could be stimulated by light. Rudolf Walther Ladenburg, a German scientist, was the first to notice stimulated emission in 1928, albeit at the time it seemed to have no practical use.

After working at Columbia University in New York City for many years, Charles H. Townes came up with a novel approach to creating stimulated emission at microwave frequencies. At the end of 1953, he developed a functional device that focussed “excited” ammonia molecules in a resonant microwave cavity, where they radiated a pure microwave frequency. Townes designated the device as a maser, which stands for “microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation,” according to Wikipedia. The theory of maser functioning was separately developed by Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Prokhorov and Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, and they published their findings in the journal Nature. 

After that, there was a flurry of maser research in the mid-1950s, although masers were only useful for a narrow range of applications, such as low-noise microwave amplifiers and atomic clocks, at that time. Arthur L. Schawlow (then at Bell Laboratories), Townes’ brother-in-law and a former postdoctoral student at Columbia University, recommended in 1957 that they attempt to extend the maser activity to shorter wavelengths of infrared or visible light, which were significantly shorter wavelengths at the time. Townes also had conversations with a Ph.D. student Gordon Gould, at Columbia University and helped him to swiftly develop his laser ideas. When Townes and Schawlow presented their ideas for an “optical maser” in a landmark piece in Physical Review on December 15, 1958, they were considered revolutionary. Gould was also busy inventing the term laser and filing a patent application for it. As a result, the question of whether Townes or Gould should be acknowledged as the “creator” of the laser became a source of heated discussion and resulted in years of litigation. Eventually, Gould was awarded a series of four patents, beginning in 1977, that resulted in millions of dollars in royalties for the rest of his life.

Other Relevant Information and Details:

• A laser is an abbreviation that stands for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”, which is what the name “laser” originally stood for.
• There was a device known as a “maser” before the laser was invented. This abbreviation stood for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” and it was based on Albert Einstein’s idea of stimulated emission masers, which were utilized in atomic clocks in the early twentieth century.
• The world’s most powerful laser has the same destructive force as a nuclear weapon.
• Laser measurement is accurate to a greater than a nanometer, which is a billionth of a meter in length.
• The power of early lasers was measured in “Gillette,” which is the number of razor blades that a beam was capable of passing through.