Who Invented Laser?
Theodore Harold Ted Maiman, a physicist in the United States, made the first working laser in 1960. He was then working at Hughes Research Laboratories. Although the foundations had been laid by the famous German scientist Albert Einstein in as early as the 1917, it was Theodore H. Maiman, who succeeded for the first time in making a working laser. He has won both the Japan Prize and the Wolf Prize in Physics for his achievements.
Albert Einstein, in 1917, published a paper named ‘Zur Quantentheorie der Strahlung’ (in German), which laid the foundation of future work on laser. He introduced Einstein coefficients (numbers) for the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic waves. The phenomenon of ‘stimulated emission’ was experimentally verified eleven years later by a German atomic physicist, Rudolf Walter Ladenburg. This was followed by gas lasers, free-electron lasers, emission lasers, semiconductor lasers etc. The improvements continued and now the lasers are all around us. Open a CD or a DVD player and there will be a laser inside it. Lasers have been used to measure the exact distance of the moon from our planet. There are other numerous uses of it. Today, the world’s most powerful laser is Nova Laser, built by the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The laser produces 1.25 petawatts of energy. (1 peta watt = 1,000,000,000,000,000 watts).
