Related topics: light · laser · electrons · molecules · atoms

Making a femtosecond laser out of glass

Is it possible to make a femtosecond laser entirely out of glass? That's the rabbit hole that Yves Bellouard, head of EPFL's Galatea Laboratory, went down after years of spending hours—and hours—aligning femtosecond lasers ...

What is quantum squeezing?

How many times have you shown up to a video meeting with people at work only to find you have terrible internet that day? Maybe the others on the call are cutting in and out, or maybe your own signal is being corrupted on ...

Brighter comb lasers on a chip mean new applications

Researchers have shown that dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs) can be used to create chip-based optical frequency combs with enough output power for use in optical atomic clocks and other practical applications. The advance ...

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Laser

A laser is a device that emits light (electromagnetic radiation) through a process called stimulated emission. The term laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. Laser light is usually spatially coherent, which means that the light either is emitted in a narrow, low-divergence beam, or can be converted into one with the help of optical components such as lenses. Typically, lasers are thought of as emitting light with a narrow wavelength spectrum ("monochromatic" light). This is not true of all lasers, however: some emit light with a broad spectrum, while others emit light at multiple distinct wavelengths simultaneously. The coherence of typical laser emission is distinctive. Most other light sources emit incoherent light, which has a phase that varies randomly with time and position.

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