Elementary idea of LASER
Laser, a device that stimulates atoms or molecules to emit light at particular wavelengths and amplifies that light, typically producing a very narrow beam of radiation. The emission generally covers an extremely limited range of visible, infrared, or ultraviolet wavelengths. Many different types of lasers have been developed, with highly varied characteristics. Laser is an acronym for “light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.”
The laser is an outgrowth of a suggestion made by Albert Einstein in 1916 that under the proper circumstances atoms could release excess energy as light—either spontaneously or when stimulated by light. German physicist Rudolf Walther Ladenburg first observed stimulated emission in 1928, although at the time it seemed to have no practical use.
In 1951 Charles H. Townes, then at Columbia University in New York City, thought of a way to generate stimulated emission at microwave frequencies. At the end of 1953, he demonstrated a working device that focused “excited” (see below Energy levels and stimulated emissions) ammonia molecules in a resonant microwave cavity, where they emitted a pure microwave frequency. Townes named the device a maser, for “microwave amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation.” Aleksandr Mikhaylovich Prokhorov and Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov of the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow independently described the theory of maser operation. For their work all three shared the 1964 Nobel Prize for Physics.
An intense burst of maser research followed in the mid-1950s, but masers found only a limited range of applications as low-noise microwave amplifiers and atomic clocks. In 1957 Townes proposed to his brother-in-law and former postdoctoral student at Columbia University, Arthur L. Schawlow (then at Bell Laboratories), that they try to extend maser action to the much shorter wavelengths of infrared or visible light. Townes also had discussions with a graduate student at Columbia University, Gordon Gould, who quickly developed his own laser ideas. Townes and Schawlow published their ideas for an “optical maser” in a seminal paper in the December 15, 1958, issue of Physical Review. Meanwhile, Gould coined the word laser and wrote a patent application. Whether Townes or Gould should be credited as the “inventor” of the laser thus became a matter of intense debate and led to years of litigation. Eventually, Gould received a series of four patents starting in 1977 that earned him millions of dollars in royalties.
Fundamental Principles of laser
Energy levels and stimulated emissions
Laser emission is shaped by the rules of quantum mechanics, which limit atoms and molecules to having discrete amounts of stored energy that depend on the nature of the atom or molecule. The lowest energy level for an individual atom occurs when its electrons are all in the nearest possible orbits to its nucleus (see electronic configuration). This condition is called the ground state. When one or more of an atom’s electrons have absorbed energy, they can move to outer orbits, and the atom is then referred to as being “excited.” Excited states are generally not stable; as electrons drop from higher-energy to lower-energy levels, they emit the extra energy as light.
Laser elements
Population inversions can be produced in a gas, liquid, or solid, but most laser media are gases or solids. Typically, laser gases are contained in cylindrical tubes and excited by an electric current or external light source, which is said to “pump” the laser. Similarly, solid-state lasers may use semiconductors or transparent crystals with small concentrations of light-emitting atoms.
An optical resonator is needed to build up the light energy in the beam. The resonator is formed by placing a pair of mirrors facing each other so that light emitted along the line between the mirrors is reflected back and forth. When a population inversion is created in the medium, light reflected back and forth increases in intensity with each pass through the laser medium. Other light leaks around the mirrors without being amplified. In an actual laser cavity, one or both mirrors transmit a fraction of the incident light. The fraction of light transmitted—that is, the laser beam—depends on the type of laser. If the laser generates a continuous beam, the amount of light added by stimulated emission on each round trip between the mirrors equals the light emerging in the beam plus losses within the optical resonator.
The combination of laser medium and resonant cavity forms what often is called simply a laser but technically is a laser oscillator. Oscillation determines many laser properties, and it means that the device generates light internally. Without mirrors and a resonant cavity, a laser would just be an optical amplifier, which can amplify light from an external source but not generate a beam internally. Elias Snitzer, a researcher at American Optical, demonstrated the first optical amplifier in 1961, but such devices were little used until the spread of communications based on fibre optics.
Laser Applications
Lasers deliver coherent, monochromatic, well-controlled, and precisely directed light beams. Although lasers make poor choices for general-purpose illumination, they are ideal for concentrating light in space, time, or particular wavelengths. For example, many people were first introduced to lasers by concerts in the early 1970s that incorporated laser light shows, in which moving laser beams of different colours projected changing patterns on planetarium domes, concert-hall ceilings, or outdoor clouds.
Most laser applications fall into one of a few broad categories:
- Transmission and processing of information,
- precise delivery of energy, and
- alignment, measurement, and imaging. These categories cover diverse applications, from pinpoint energy delivery for delicate surgery to heavy-duty welding and from the mundane alignment of suspended ceilings to laboratory measurements of atomic properties.
Holography
Holography, means of creating a unique photographic image without the use of a lens. The photographic recording of the image is called a hologram, which appears to be an unrecognizable pattern of stripes and whorls but which—when illuminated by coherent light, as by a laser beam—organizes the light into a three-dimensional representation of the original object.
An ordinary photographic image records the variations in intensity of light reflected from an object, producing dark areas where less light is reflected and light areas where more light is reflected. Holography, however, records not only the intensity of the light but also its phase, or the degree to which the wave fronts making up the reflected light are in step with each other, or coherent. Ordinary light is incoherent—that is, the phase relationships between the multitude of waves in a beam are completely random; wave fronts of ordinary light waves are not in step.
Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian-born scientist, invented holography in 1948, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physics more than 20 years later (1971). Gabor considered the possibility of improving the resolving power of the electron microscope, first by utilizing the electron beam to make a hologram of the object and then by examining this hologram with a beam of coherent light. In Gabor’s original system the hologram was a record of the interference between the light diffracted by the object and a collinear background. This automatically restricts the process to that class of objects that have considerable areas that are transparent. When the hologram is used to form an image, twin images are formed. The light associated with these images is propagating in the same direction, and hence in the plane of one image light from the other image appears as an out-of-focus component. Although a degree of coherence can be obtained by focusing light through a very small pinhole, this technique reduces the light intensity too much for it to serve in holography; therefore, Gabor’s proposal was for several years of only theoretical interest. The development of lasers in the early 1960s suddenly changed the situation. A laser beam has not only a high degree of coherence but high intensity as well.
Of the many kinds of laser beam, two have especial interest in holography: the continuous-wave (CW) laser and the pulsed laser. The CW laser emits a bright, continuous beam of a single, nearly pure colour. The pulsed laser emits an extremely intense, short flash of light that lasts only about 1/100,000,000 of a second. Two scientists in the United States, Emmett N. Leith and Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan, applied the CW laser to holography and achieved great success, opening the way to many research applications.
Principles Of Holography
In essence, the problem Gabor conceived in his attempt to improve the electron microscope was the same as the one photographers have confronted in their search for three-dimensional realism in photography. To achieve it, the light streaming from the source must itself be photographed. If the waves of this light, with their multitude of rapidly moving crests and troughs, can be frozen for an instant and photographed, the wave pattern can then be reconstructed and will exhibit the same three-dimensional character as the object from which the light is reflected. Holography accomplishes such a reconstruction by recording the phase content as well as the amplitude content of the reflected light waves of a laser beam.
Continuous-Wave Laser Holography
In a darkened room, a beam of coherent laser light is directed onto object O from source B. The beam is reflected, scattered, and diffracted by the physical features of the object and arrives on a photographic plate at P. Simultaneously, part of the laser beam is split off as an incident, or reference, beam A and is reflected by mirror M also onto plate P. The two beams interfere with each other; that is, their respective amplitudes of waves combine, creating on the photographic plate a complex pattern of stripes and whorls called interference fringes. These fringes consist of alternate light and dark areas. The light areas result when the two beams striking the plate are in step—when crest meets crest and trough meets trough in the waves from the two beams; the beams are then in phase, and so reinforce each other. When the two waves are of equal amplitude but opposite phase—trough meeting crest and crest meeting trough—they cancel each other and a dark area results.
The plate, when developed, is called a hologram. The image on the plate bears no resemblance to the object photographed but contains a record of all the phase and amplitude information present in the beam reflected from the object. The two parts of the laser beam—the direct and the reflected beams—meet on the plate at a wide angle and are recorded as very fine and close-packed interference fringes on the hologram. This pattern of fringes contains all the optical information of the object being photographed.
Pulsed-Laser Holography
A moving object can be made to appear to be at rest when a hologram is produced with the extremely rapid and high-intensity flash of a pulsed ruby laser. The duration of such a pulse can be less than 1/10,000,000 of a second; and, as long as the object does not move more than 1/10 of a wavelength of light during this short time interval, a usable hologram can be obtained. A continuous-wave laser produces a much less intense beam, requiring long exposures; thus it is not suitable when even the slightest motion is present. With the rapidly flashing light source provided by the pulsed laser, exceedingly fast-moving objects can be examined. Chemical reactions often change optical properties of solutions; by means of holography, such reactions can be studied. Holograms created with pulsed lasers have the same three-dimensional characteristics as those made with CW sources.
Pulsed-laser holography has been used in wind-tunnel experiments. Usually high-speed air flow around aerodynamic objects is studied with an optical interferometer (a device for detecting small changes in interference fringes, in this instance caused by variations in air density). Such an instrument is difficult to adjust and hard to keep stable. Furthermore, all of its optical components (mirrors, plates, and the like) in the optical path must be of high quality and sturdy enough to minimize distortion under high gas-flow velocities. The holographic system, however, avoids the stringent requirements of optical interferometry. It records interferometrically refractive-index changes in the air flow created by pressure changes as the gas deflects around the aerodynamic object.
Major Applications Of Holography
Because the real image from the hologram can be viewed by a camera or microscope, it is possible to examine difficult and even inaccessible regions of the original object. This feature renders holography useful for many purposes. A deep, narrow depression on a plane, for example, cannot often be reached by a microscope objective because of working distance limitations. If the detail can be reached by coherent light, however, a hologram can be taken and its image reconstructed. Since this image is aerial, the microscope can be positioned in such a way that it can focus on the required region. In the same way, a camera also can be focused at the required depth and can photograph objects inside a deep transparent chamber.
Many holographic applications exploit the fact that composite repeat holograms of a surface tilted slightly after each exposure can be treated as composite, repeat wave patterns. If two such patterns are matched, a condition arises that is effectively the same as that which exists in ordinary classical two-beam interferometry, in which a single light source is split into two beams and the beams recombined to form interference patterns. Such an arrangement can be set up in several ways; in one, a holographic exposure is made of a surface, then, before the hologram is removed or developed, the surface is slightly tilted and a repeat hologram is made, superimposed on the first hologram. When this double hologram is reconstructed, the object as well as the surface covered by the interference fringes caused by surface irregularities can be seen. These fringes reveal microtopographic information about the object.
Holographic interferometry can be applied successfully to any situation in which the wave front is modified slightly, no matter how complex the surface may be. Elastic deformation effects can be studied by superimposing the two wave fronts on the hologram, reflected before and after the elastic distortion effect has been introduced. When reconstructed, the hologram provides a clear picture of the object, crossed by interference fringes. Even highly complex shapes respond to this approach in a manner that would be impossible in classical interferometry. There is also great flexibility in the choice of methods used to apply distortions, and even these conditions alone often completely exclude optical interferometry. Not only static distortion but also slow dynamic variations can be studied in this manner. And with pulsed ruby lasers, very fast, short-time variations can be studied.
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