1 One of the first lasers (shown disassembled).
Corning Inc./Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL
On 16 May 1960 Theodore Maiman of Hughes Research Labs in the USA, demonstrated one of the first optical lasers (1). The word ‘laser’ was coined by Gordon Gould, a student at Columbia University who made a laser around the same time. (There was a long-running legal dispute over who made the first one.) It is an acronym for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation’, which describes how a laser works.
Electrons bound within atoms or molecules can only have certain distinct energies. If an electron is excited, it can lose excess energy by emission of radiation (2).
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