LASERS: A Walk Through History: Laser: Fundamentals and Applications
LASERS: A Walk Through History: Laser: Fundamentals and Applications
LASERS: A Walk Through History: Laser: Fundamentals and Applications
Max Planck
Albert Einstein
Finally!!!!
Theodore H. Maiman
Theodore H. Maiman
Ruby Laser
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• December 1960: Ali Javan, William Bennett Jr. and Donald Herriott
develop the helium-neon (HeNe) laser, the first to generate a
continuous beam of light at 1.15 μm.
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• October 1962: Nick Holonyak Jr, publishes his work on the “visible
red” GaAsP (gallium arsenide phosphide) laser diode, a compact,
efficient source of visible coherent light that is the basis for today’s
red LEDs used in consumer products such as CDs, DVD players and
cell phones.
• June 1962: Bell Labs reports the first yttrium aluminium garnet
(YAG) laser.
• 1963: Herbert, and the team of Rudolf Kazarinov and Zhores Alferov,
independently propose ideas to build semiconductor lasers from
heterostructure devices. The work leads to Kroemer and Alferov winning
the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics.
• 1964: Townes, Basov and Prokhorov are awarded the Nobel Prize
in physics for their “fundamental work in the field of quantum
electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and
amplifiers based on the maser-laser-principle.”
• 1965: Two lasers are phase-locked for the first time at Bell Labs, an
important step toward optical communications.
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• 1966: Charles K. Kao, working with George Hockham, makes a discovery that
leads to a breakthrough in fibre optics. He calculates how to transmit light over
long distances via optical glass fibres, deciding that, with a fibre of purest glass,
it would be possible to transmit light signals over a distance of 100 km,
compared with only 20 m for the fibres available in the 1960s. Kao receives a
2009 Nobel Prize in physics for his work.
• 1966: French physicist Alfred Kastler wins the Nobel Prize in physics for his
method of stimulating atoms to higher energy states. The technique, known as
optical pumping, was an important step toward the creation of the maser and
the laser.
• 1966: Sorokin, P. and Lankard, J. - Demonstration of first Dye Laser action at IBM
Labs.
•
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• June 26, 1974: A pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum is the first product
read by a bar-code scanner in a grocery store.
• 1978: The LaserDisc hits the home video market, with little impact.
The earliest players use HeNe laser tubes to read the media, while
later players use infrared laser diodes.
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• 1985: Steven Chu and his colleagues use laser light to slow and
manipulate atoms. Their laser cooling technique, also called “optical
molasses,” is used to investigate the behaviour of atoms, providing an
insight into quantum mechanics. Chu, Claude N. Cohen-Tannoudji and
William D. Phillips win a Nobel Prize for this work in 1997.
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• November 1996: The first pulsed atom laser, which uses matter
instead of light, is demonstrated at MIT by Wolfgang Ketterle.
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• August 2007: Bowers and his doctoral student Brian Koch announce
that they have built the first mode-locked silicon evanescent laser,
providing a new way to integrate optical and electronic functions on
a single chip and enabling new types of integrated circuits.
Laser : Fundamentals and Applications
• May 29, 2009: The largest and highest-energy laser in the world,
the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory is dedicated. In a few weeks, the system begins firing all
192 of its laser beams onto targets.
• March 31, 2010: Rainer Blatt and Piet O. Schmidt and their team at
the University of Innsbruck in Austria demonstrate a single-atom
laser with and without threshold behavior by tuning the strength
of atom/light field coupling