You might’ve probably heard of lasers before or maybe even seen a laser in the films ‘Resident Evil’ or ‘Final destination’ or the infamous ‘Star Wars. It is it has been in usage for more than a century now. The concept of the laser was first presented in the year 1917 by Albert Einstein.
A laser is basically a device that stimulates atoms and particles to emit a very narrow Infrared beam of highly intensive monochromatic coherent light. The light beam is coherent meaning that the waves are always on the same phase, angle, and frequency. Differentiating a laser beam from normal light beams is pretty easy because laser beams have a single wavelength which means they will exist in the wavelength’s color making them monochromatic.
The waves are sharply focused, they are monochromatic and not dispersed making them extremely intensive. This is the reason you will have to be extra careful around laser devices a laser beam can effortlessly pierce through your flesh and bones if it’s not the right amount of intensity.
Every letter in the word laser is used to represent the process of producing a certain type of laser beam on the device. Here is how it works- Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
To produce a laser beam you will have to get an atom to an excited state and make it jump into the ground state, all of this happens in less than a fraction of a second but when the atom jumps from excited to ground state it produces radiations. The radiations have to be a couple with a coherence that is they need to be in the same phase, angle, direction, and frequency.
Solid beams are produced by all states of materials like solids- glasses, crystalline. Liquids- dye, sodium fluorescein. Gases- a mixture of the elements Helium and Neon. Semiconductors- Gallium Arsenide. Laser beams are produced through a device that has a 100 percent reflective convex mirror and a 95 percent reflective mirror. Why does the device have only one fully reflective mirror? Because the other one is what lets us know the intensity of the beam.
Laser beams have been in use for a long time at first they were only used to study the working of atomic physics and chemistry and then people slowly improved into using them for projecting straight lines for alignment at construction sites and irrigation. Now it is a whole new world of laser applications. As days passed by people started to realize just how powerful it is and in how many ways it could be used.
It is also used by doctors for hair removal, in some surgical ways like destroying the stones developed in kidneys, they are also used to correct eyesight for a lot of people with vision disturbances like myopia, hypermetropia, and presbyopia. The laser beams are very widely used to mark and engrave metal all across the globe.
For three-dimensional images of any object, you might have already come across this in films where the actors project a blueprint of some place’s layout. It is also used in optical fiber communications to send information over large distances with low loss. For example, they are used in the navy to send signals through submarines in scenes of danger.
Also used as a potential energy source for including nuclear fusion reaction. And lastly for some other normal things like engraving metals, cutting glass, diamonds, mending metals, etc. however, it’s not something everyone can experiment on, medical technicians need a license to get to handle laser and so do organizations where it is used regularly.
