Abstract
Before continuing the story, I take a diversion into the basic physical principles underlying the operation of lasers to help the reader follow its chronology and development later in the text. This background will also clarify the tenuous connection between masers and lasers.
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Notes
- 1.
Light (electromagnetic radiation) has, in a sense, a dual nature. Although it is a wave phenomenon, sometimes it is more convenient to consider light as a beam of particles called photons. The two representations can be shown to be mathematically equivalent.
- 2.
“The right energy” is the condition where the photon energy is exactly equal to the energy needed to raise the atom from its ground state up to one of its excited states (the energy needed to raise the marble from the floor to the table top).
- 3.
The frequency of an electromagnetic wave and the energy of its associated photons are connected by a fundamental parameter known as “Planck’s constant”—the higher the wave frequency, the higher the photon energy.
- 4.
Equations used in the analysis of population densities include the effective temperature of the system, and a system with an inverted population is described as having “negative temperature”.
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Maiman, T.H. (2018). Building Blocks. In: The Laser Inventor. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61940-8_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61940-8_6
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