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Lasers Invention to Application (1987) / Chapter Skim
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Interactions between the Science and Technology of Lasers
Pages 123-130

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From page 123...
... Townes, who understood the principle, were motivated to take advantage of the unique properties of these devices by their work with radar in World War II (Townes, 1984~. Since that time, there has been continuing interaction between the science and its applications, so the laser is an ideal example with which to study the interrelations between engineering and science in a new technology.
From page 124...
... In 1951 Purcell and Pound demonstrated population inversion in a nuclear spin system by rapid reversal of the magnetic field.2 Although a brilliant experiment, it was not intended as a practical device; the first practical stimulated emission device was the ammonia-beam maser of Gordon, Zeiger, and Townes described in 1954. This was quite a complicated device, so the three-level, solid-state maser proposed by Bloembergen and demonstrated by Scovil, Feher, and Seidel became the important quantum electronics device of the 1950s.
From page 125...
... The first gas laser was the infrared heliumneon laser of pagan, Bennett, and Herriott in 1961. In 1962, four groups announced lasing action in the semiconductor LASERS THE FIRST ROUND _~
From page 126...
... Engineering departments had become involved in the research on masers shortly after the announcement by Gordon, Zeiger, and Townes in 1955, however, and there was little difference between the courses taken by individual doctoral students in engineering departments and those in physics departments. Moreover, the major industrial research laboratories Hughes, the Bell Laboratories, IBM, and others- made little distinction between the assignments of doctorates with engineering degrees and those with science degrees.
From page 127...
... Analyses of a variety of mode-locking techniques were made by Yariv and by Harris and colleagues. Shortly after, DeMaria and colleagues recognized that pulses as short as a picosecond were possible by passively mode locking neodymium lasers through the use of a saturable dye within the resonator.
From page 128...
... INTERACTION AMONG TH E SOCI ETI ES The first article on the ammonia maser of Gordon, Zeiger, and Townes was published in Physical Review, but was later reproduced in the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers because of the maser's recognized potential as a low-noise amplifier or ultrastable oscillator. The Physical Review continued to accept maser papers for some time, until the editors decided that the field was well enough established that such papers should go to 3For later developments in the generation of short pulses, see the special issue on picosecond phenomena in IEEE journal of Quantum Electronics, Vol.
From page 129...
... The first Quantum Electronics Conference was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, but later conferences were cosponsored by one or more societies, with the 1986 International Quantum Electronics Conference cosponsored by the American Physical Society, the IEEE, the Optical Society of America, and the European Physical Society. The annual Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics is jointly sponsored by IEEE, the Optical Society, the European Physical Society, and the Japanese Quantum Electronics Joint Group.
From page 130...
... With diffused or random couplings, the energy that begins in one system may become more equally shared between the two after an initial transfer period. The kinds of couplings we have seen between science and engineering in the laser field have elements of the coupling example first described, but more of the second.


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