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emission in 1917, it was not found experimentally for over 10 years and took over another 30 years just to predict the possibility of
a laser. This is basically because it was not considered possible to produce a population inversion because of the above inequality.
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In the above diagram of a three level laser the pump causes an excitation from the ground state to the second excited state. This
state is a rather short-lived state, so that the atom quickly decays into the first excited level. [Decays back to the ground state also
occur, but these atoms can be pumped back to the second excited state again.] The first excited state is a long-lived (i.e. metastable)
state which allows the atom to "wait" for the "passer-by" photon while building up a large population of atoms in this state. The
lasing transition, in this laser, is due to the decay of the atom from this first excited metastable state to the ground state. If the
number of atoms in the ground state exceeds the number of atoms that are pumped into the excited state, then there is a high
likelihood that the "lasing photon" will be absorbed and we will not get sustained laser light. The fact that the lower lasing
transition is the ground state makes it rather difficult to achieve efficient population inversion. In a ruby laser this task is
accomplished by providing the ruby crystal with a very strong pulsating light source, called a flash lamp. The flash lamp produces
a very strong pulse of light that is designed to excite the atoms from their ground state into any short-lived upper level.t In this way
the ground state is depopulated and population inversion is achieved until a pulse of laser light is emitted. In the ruby laser the flash
lamp light lasts for about 1/1000 of a second (1 ms) and can be repeated about every second. The duration of the laser pulse is
shorter than this, typically 0.1 ms. In some pulsed lasers the pulse duration can be tailored using special methods to be much
shorter than this, down to about 10 fs (where 1 fs = 10-15 s or one thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a second). So, the
output of a three-level laser is not continuous, but consists of pulses of laser light.
Here, the lower laser level is not the ground state. As a result, even a pump that may not be very efficient could produce population
inversion, so long as the upper level of the laser transition is longer lived than the lower level. Of course, all attempts are made to
design a pump that maximizes the number of excited atoms. A typical four-level laser is the helium-neon (He-Ne) gas laser. In
these lasers electric pumping excites helium atoms to an excited state whose energy is roughly the same as the upper short-lived
state in the neon atom. The sole purpose of the helium atoms is to exchange energy with neon atoms via collisional excitation. As it
turns out, this is a very efficient way of getting neon atoms to lase.
Laser components
All lasers have three primary components:
Medium
Pump
Resonant Cavity
The laser medium can be gaseous, liquid, or a solid. These could include atoms, molecules, or collections of atoms that would be
involved in a laser transition. Typically, a laser is distinguished by its medium, even though two lasers using different media may
have more in common than two which have similar media.
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There are three different laser pumps: electromagnetic, optical, and chemical. Most lasers are pumped electro-magnetically,
meaning via collisions with either electrons or ions. Dye lasers and many solid state lasers are pumped optically; however, solid
state lasers are typically pumped with a broad band (range of wavelengths) flash-lamp type light source, or with a narrow band
semiconductor laser. Chemically pumped lasers, using chemical reactions as an energy source, are not very efficient. So far, these
lasers have been made to work not so much for their usefulness as for their curious operation.
Up to now in our discussion of laser theory we have not really seen how the beam is generated. We know that photons emitted by
stimulated emission travel coherently in the same direction, but what is it that defines the beam direction and what allows the
intensity of the laser light to get large? The answer to these two questions is coupled together in the resonant cavity. Laser resonant
cavities usually have two flat or concave mirrors, one on either end, that reflect lasing photons back and forth so that stimulated
emission continues to build up more and more laser light. The "back" mirror is made as close to 100% reflective as possible, while
the "front" mirror typically is made only 95 - 99% reflective so that the rest of the light is transmitted by this mirror and leaks out to
make up the actual laser beam outside the laser device.
The resonant cavity thus accounts for the directionality of the beam since only those photons that bounce back and forth between
the mirrors lead to amplification of the stimulated emission. Once the beam escapes through the front mirror it continues as a well-
directed laser beam. However, as the beam exits the laser it undergoes diffraction and does have some degree of spreading.
Typically this beam divergence is as small as 0.05o but even this small amount will be apparent if the beam travels long distances.
Even more, the resonant cavity also accounts for the amplification of the light since the path through the laser medium is elongated
by repeated passes back and forth. Typically this amplification grows exponentially, similar to the way compound interest works in
a bank. The more money in your bank account, with compound interest, the faster you earn more interest dollars. Similarly, the
more photons there are to produce stimulated emission, the larger the rate at which new coherent photons are produced. The term
used for laser light is gain, or the number of additional photons produced per unit path length.
The last question to address in this section is: why is the resonant cavity called by that name? What does resonance have to do with
having mirrors on either end of a region containing the laser medium? Recall that when we discussed resonance on a string, we
spoke about the wave traveling one way along the string (say to the right) interfering with the wave reflected at the end traveling
back to the left. At a resonant frequency, there are points at which the two waves exactly add or cancel all the time, leading to a
standing wave. At other frequencies the waves will randomly add or cancel and the wave will not have a large amplitude. The case
of a light wave traveling back and forth in the resonant cavity is exactly analogous in that only at certain resonant frequencies will
the light wave be amplified. The required condition is easy to see. The mirror separation distance, L, must be equal to a multiple of
half a wavelength of light, just as we saw in the case of a string. In symbols, we have that L = nl/2, where l is the wavelength of the
light and n is some integer. In the case of light, because of the small wavelength n is a very large number, implying that there are a
huge number of resonant frequencies. On the other hand, only those resonant frequencies that are amplified by the laser medium
will have large amplitudes and so usually there are only a few so-called laser modes or laser resonant frequencies present in the
light from a laser, as shown in the figure.
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Contributors
Jay Newman and Seyffie Maleki (Union College)
Laser Theory is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.
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