The International Conference on Lasers and Applications, Lasers 'XX was an annual conference organized by the former Society for Optical and Quantum Electronics. The conference, known in short by Lasers 'XX [1] [2] [3] (where XX refers to the particular year), was held at various locations in The United States from 1978 to 2000.
The emphasis of these conferences was laser development and in particular the development of high-power lasers. [4] [5] [6] The papers delivered at these conferences were published in a series of hard-bound volumes known as Proceedings of the International Conference on Lasers 'XX ( ISSN 0190-4132) by STS Press. In total, more than 20 book proceedings were published.
A particular feature of these conferences was the organization of high-power panel discussions on timely topics of interest, such as the role of lasers in directed energy and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. [7] [8] Noted physicists, including Edward Teller and Arthur Kantrowitz, participated in these discussions. Towards the end of the Cold War this conference enjoyed the participation of numerous Soviet laser physicists, including prominent authors such as Alexander Prokhorov and Nikolay Basov. [9]
A partial list of plenary and invited speakers include (in chronological order):
Besides the emphasis on high-power lasers and panel discussions on this subject, many scientific disclosures made at these conferences went on to contribute to, or to inspire, further research in a variety of fields including:
From Lasers '88 to Lasers '96, the prestigious Einstein Prize for Laser Science was awarded.
Carl Edwin Wieman is an American physicist and educationist at Stanford University, and currently the A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University. In 1995, while at the University of Colorado Boulder, he and Eric Allin Cornell produced the first true Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) and, in 2001, they and Wolfgang Ketterle were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Wieman currently holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics and Professor in the Stanford Graduate School of Education, as well as the DRC Professor in the Stanford University School of Engineering. In 2020, Wieman was awarded the Yidan Prize in Education Research for "his contribution in developing new techniques and tools in STEM education".
A dye laser is a laser that uses an organic dye as the lasing medium, usually as a liquid solution. Compared to gases and most solid state lasing media, a dye can usually be used for a much wider range of wavelengths, often spanning 50 to 100 nanometers or more. The wide bandwidth makes them particularly suitable for tunable lasers and pulsed lasers. The dye rhodamine 6G, for example, can be tuned from 635 nm (orangish-red) to 560 nm (greenish-yellow), and produce pulses as short as 16 femtoseconds. Moreover, the dye can be replaced by another type in order to generate an even broader range of wavelengths with the same laser, from the near-infrared to the near-ultraviolet, although this usually requires replacing other optical components in the laser as well, such as dielectric mirrors or pump lasers.
An excimer laser, sometimes more correctly called an exciplex laser, is a form of ultraviolet laser which is commonly used in the production of microelectronic devices, semiconductor based integrated circuits or "chips", eye surgery, and micromachining.
Quantum optics is a branch of atomic, molecular, and optical physics dealing with how individual quanta of light, known as photons, interact with atoms and molecules. It includes the study of the particle-like properties of photons. Photons have been used to test many of the counter-intuitive predictions of quantum mechanics, such as entanglement and teleportation, and are a useful resource for quantum information processing.
A tunable laser is a laser whose wavelength of operation can be altered in a controlled manner. While all laser gain media allow small shifts in output wavelength, only a few types of lasers allow continuous tuning over a significant wavelength range.
Theodor Wolfgang Hänsch is a German physicist. He received one-third of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.
Rhodamine 6G is a highly fluorescent rhodamine family dye. It is often used as a tracer dye within water to determine the rate and direction of flow and transport. Rhodamine dyes fluoresce and can thus be detected easily and inexpensively with instruments called fluorometers. Rhodamine dyes are used extensively in biotechnology applications such as fluorescence microscopy, flow cytometry, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy and ELISA.
The Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science is a prize that has been awarded annually by the American Physical Society since 1991. The recipient is chosen for "outstanding contributions to basic research which uses lasers to advance our knowledge of the fundamental physical properties of materials and their interaction with light". The prize is named after Arthur L. Schawlow (1921–1999), laser pioneer and a Nobel laureate in physics, and as of 2007 is valued at $10,000.
Francisco Javier "Frank" Duarte is a laser physicist and author/editor of several books on tunable lasers.
Beam expanders are optical devices that take a collimated beam of light and expand its width.
The N-slit interferometer is an extension of the double-slit interferometer also known as Young's double-slit interferometer. One of the first known uses of N-slit arrays in optics was illustrated by Newton. In the first part of the twentieth century, Michelson described various cases of N-slit diffraction.
Fritz Peter Schäfer was a German physicist, born in Hersfeld, Hesse-Nassau. He is the co-inventor of the organic dye laser. His book, Dye Lasers, is considered a classic in the field of tunable lasers. In this book the chapter written by Schäfer gives an ample and insightful exposition on organic laser dye molecules in addition to a description on the physics of telescopic, and multiple-prism, tunable narrow-linewidth laser oscillators.
Quantum mechanics was first applied to optics, and interference in particular, by Paul Dirac. Richard Feynman, in his Lectures on Physics, uses Dirac's notation to describe thought experiments on double-slit interference of electrons. Feynman's approach was extended to N-slit interferometers for either single-photon illumination, or narrow-linewidth laser illumination, that is, illumination by indistinguishable photons, by Frank Duarte. The N-slit interferometer was first applied in the generation and measurement of complex interference patterns.
A solid-state dye laser (SSDL) is a solid-state lasers in which the gain medium is a laser dye-doped organic matrix such as poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), rather than a liquid solution of the dye. These lasers are also referred to as solid-state organic lasers and solid-state dye-doped polymer lasers.
The Optica Fellow is a membership designation of Optica that denotes distinguished scientific accomplishment. The bylaws of this society only allow 10% of its membership to be designated as an Optica Fellow. The Optica Fellow requires peer group nomination.
The Einstein Prize for Laser Science was a recognition awarded by the former Society for Optical and Quantum Electronics and sponsored by the Eastman Kodak Company. The prize, awarded in the 1988–1999 period, consisted of a 3-inch brass medal including Einstein's image and a depiction of a two-level transition including the A and B coefficients. Recipients of the prize include:
An organic laser is a laser which uses an organic material as the gain medium. The first organic laser was the liquid dye laser. These lasers use laser dye solutions as their gain media.
Organic photonics includes the generation, emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing of light, using organic optical materials.
Lasing without inversion (LWI), or lasing without population inversion, is a technique used for light amplification by stimulated emission without the requirement of population inversion. A laser working under this scheme exploits the quantum interference between the probability amplitudes of atomic transitions in order to eliminate absorption without disturbing the stimulated emission. This phenomenon is also the essence of electromagnetically induced transparency.