thought for the day - Science connections of Lasers

Lasers: "The Conquest of Light" ~ 1962 AT&T Bell System; Bell Laboratories Laser Research

AT&T Archives: Inventing the Laser at Bell Labs

I've pointed out some of James Burke's connections in his Connections video series and book. For anyone new, those links are probably no longer any good.  But, anyways, for instance, James Burke points out how in agriculture leads to freeing people to specialize in certain jobs - like being a soldier, or an administrator, or even a scientist.  I'd point out that agriculture's "clearing of the fields" leads to irrigation, pest control, and another technology which I'm always forgetting. Well, in a similar way to how one idealizes a situation and concepts come out, scientists started studying one thing led to lasers.

I think this second short laser documentary, actually, points out this remarkable indirect connection which led to lasers. Townes was studying spectroscopy of molecules, and noticed stimulated emission of the same wavelength photons.

Lasers also led to quantum optics - learning optics that allows laser light to come out of the mirrors when they're in step with one another.

These laser documentaries show that at one time, making a continuous laser, instead of pulse lasers was an accomplishment. Since then, lasers have been advancing more than one can imagine. I thought I'd quote an almost certainly incomplete timeline of laser accomplishments, and already well outdated,

"1960: Ali Javan and William Bennett Jr. develop the first helium-neon laser.
1960: the first phone call is transmitted via laser at Bell Labs. 1962: the first yttrium aluminum garnet laser is developed at Bell Labs. 1964: Kumar Patel at Bell Labs invents the carbon dioxide laser; it is the primary tool in laser surgery. 1964: the Nd:YAG laser is invented by Joseph Geusic and Richard Smith at Bell Labs. 1965: the first tunable laser is developed by J. Giordmaine and Robert Miller. 1965: a laser is used at Bell Labs to create the first 2-color hologram. 1970: Arthur Ashkin invents optical trapping, a process in which atoms are trapped by lasers. 1971: Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish design the first semiconductor laser that runs at room temperature. 1972: laser beams are used to etch circuits on ceramic materials. 1977: the first laser-fiber-optic communications system is installed in Chicago. 1983: Linn Mollenauer and Roger Stolen create the soliton laser. 1983: the cleaved-coupled-capacity laser is patented by Won-Tien Tsang. 1985: Steven Chu, L. Hollberg, J.E. Bjorkhom, A. Cable and A. Ashkin first observe the optical cooling of atoms, referred to as "optical molasses." 1993: Bell Labs develop the first self-focusing lasers, called zone lasers. 1994: the first quantum cascade laser is invented at Bell Labs by Jerome Faist, Federico Capasso, Deborah L. Sivco, Carlo Sirtori, Albert L. Hutchinson and Alfred Y. Cho."

- I've seen so many crazy laser advances, I can't even remember them all - quasi-crystal lasers.

The ability to control the shape of the lasers. Usually, the lasers come out as a kind of point with sporadic points that thin out the further away from the central point. This is kind of the quantum double slit affect. In the double slit experiment, if you open a slit to the side of where a photon is being shot in, you'll get interference patterns. In lasers, you can see this on a macroscale.

One of the most recent laser advances that I thought was exciting was the use supersymmetric physics theories applied to lasers - A laser system built on principles of supersymmetry

Here's a fractal light laser - Research team demonstrates fractal light from lasers