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On the other hand, the light from a semiconductor laser typically exits the tiny crystal with a large divergence: up to 50°. However even such a divergent beam can be transformed into a similarly collimated beam employing a lens system, as is always included, for instance, in a laser pointer whose light originates from a laser diode. That is ...
The latter is called the output coupler, because it allows some of the light to leave the cavity to produce the laser's output beam. Light from the medium, produced by spontaneous emission, is reflected by the mirrors back into the medium, where it may be amplified by stimulated emission. The light may reflect from the mirrors and thus pass ...
Laser light is a type of stimulated emission of radiation. Stimulated emission is the process by which an incoming photon of a specific frequency can interact with an excited atomic electron (or other excited molecular state), causing it to drop to a lower energy level.
Light is generated in a semiconductor laser by radiative recombination of electrons and holes. In order to generate more light by stimulated emission than is lost by absorption, the system's population density has to be inverted, see the article on lasers. A laser is, thus, always a high carrier density system that entails many-body interactions.
The preparation of this state requires an external energy source and is known as laser pumping. Pumping may be achieved with electrical currents (e.g. semiconductors, or gases via high-voltage discharges) or with light, generated by discharge lamps or by other lasers (semiconductor lasers).
An other active research area of laser–matter interaction is the radiation pressure acceleration of ions or protons from thin–foil targets. [35] High ion energy beams can be generated for medical applications (for example in ion beam therapy [36]) by the radiation pressure of short laser pulses on ultra-thin foils.
Perturbative harmonic generation is a process whereby laser light of frequency ω and photon energy ħω can be used to generate new frequencies of light. The newly generated frequencies are integer multiples nω of the original light's frequency. This process was first discovered in 1961 by Franken et al., [1] using a ruby laser, with ...
The input laser light (bottom of the picture, not visible before entry into the fiber) is near-infrared and generates wavelengths covering most of the visible spectrum. Supercontinuum generation from a photonic crystal optical fiber (seen as a glowing thread on the left) for gradually increasing intensity of a pump laser.