An acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." The first working laser was built by Maiman Eric Weisstein's World of Biography (1960), and made use of optical pumping of a ruby crystal from a flash lamp. The first continuous laser was produced by Nelson and Boyle (1962) using an arc lamp instead of a flash lamp.
Natural lasing in the 10 m bands of CO2 in the atmospheres of Mars Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy and Venus Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy was observed by Johnson et al. (1976), and subsequently studied in detail in the mesospheres and tropospheres of Mars Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy (Mumma et al. 1981) and Venus Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy (Deming and Mumma 1983). In these atmospheres, the population inversion is pumped by sunlight (Mumma et al. 1981, Deming and Mumma 1983, Gordiets and Panchenko 1983, Stepanova and Shved 1985, Dickinson and Bougher 1986, Mumma 1993). The distinction between lasing and masing in space sources is ambiguous in the infrared region of the spectrum, so that the claim that the "first natural laser" was observed at 169 m by Strelnitsky, Erickson, and Haas in Kuiper Airborne Observatory observations of the accretion disk surrounding the star MWC349 in Cygnus (Glanz 1995) is not very significant considering that 450 and 850 m "masing" had already been identified in the same source (Thum et al. 1994ab, Mumma 1996).
Laser Cooling, Laser Trapping, Maser
References
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