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Friday 18 December 2015

Laser

A laser is a machine that makes an amplified, single-color source of light. The word 'Laser' stands for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation."


Albert Einstein was the first to have the idea of stimulated emission that could produce a laser. From that point many years were spent to see if the idea worked.

In 1957, Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow, working at Bell Labs, began a serious study of the infrared laser. They called the concept an "optical maser". Schawlow and Townes submitted a manuscript of their theoretical calculations to the Physical Review, published in 1958  in Volume 112, Issue No. 6. Schawlow and Townes were granted the first patent for a laser (US. No. 2,929,922) under the title “Masers and Maser Communications System” on March 22, 1960.

American physicist Theodore Maiman operated the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California on May 16, 1960. In doing so, he beat several other research teams, including those of Townes and Schawlow.


Even the first laser was recognized as being potentially dangerous. Theodore Maiman characterized the first laser as having a power of one "Gillette" as it could burn through one Gillette razor blade.

Astronauts left mirrors on the moon so that laser beams can be bounced off of them from Earth to measure the distance with precision.

Lasers have found many uses in everyday life as well as in industry. The first use of lasers in the daily lives of the general population was the supermarket barcode scanner, introduced in 1974.

The LaserDisc player, introduced in 1978, was the first successful consumer product to include a laser. It was the Compact Disc player, an evolution of LaserDisc technology. that was the first laser-equipped device to become common, beginning in 1982 followed shortly by laser printers (see below).


The Excimer laser, was used in the 1970s for etching silicone computer chips..Working in the IBM research laboratories, Dr. Rangaswamy Srinivasin, observed the potential of the Excimer laser in interacting with biological tissue as removing tissue with a laser does not cause any heat damage to the neighboring material.

In 1983 Dr. Srinivasin and Dr. Stephen Trokel, a New York ophthalmologist reported the successful use of the laser for operating on a cow's cornea. Four years later, Dr Trokel successfully performed the first laser surgery on a patient's eyes.

LASIK eye surgery uses the same algorithm NASA created to dock space shuttles in order to properly align the laser to the eye.

You would need 200,000 standard laser pointers all focusing through a lens to an exact point to create a laser powerful enough to kill.


Pointing a laser at an airplane in the U.S. can get you up to 20 years in prison.

1 comment:

  1. Professor Prem raj Pushpakaran writes -- 2021 marks the birth centenary year of Arthur Leonard Schawlow!!!
    https://www.youth4work.com/y/profpremrajpushpakaran/Prof-Prem-Raj-Pushpakaran-popularity

    ReplyDelete