Lasers are everywhere. Whether it is in your latest console for your gaming pleasure, or in your doctor’s clinic for routine surgery, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (more commonly known as LASER) has been a key component of a large number of devices and a key tool for the development and fabrication of a huge majority of devices in our present times. Along with the transistor, lasers have been a key tool for the information age that we live in and for that, we thank you Albert Einstein. He predicted the occurrence of such a phenomenon five decades before lasers started being produced and used commercially. Since then, the rapidly growing field of lasers has garnered the attention of the smartest minds in academia. As we stand today, “lasing” has been accepted in the Oxford English dictionary as a verb for the action of a laser.
Lasers have become popular due to the characteristics of the light emitted by them. The light emitted by a laser is highly coherent (almost all the light waves are in phase). Additionally, due to the specific energy levels of atoms, molecules, ions and other such species; the light emanating from these sources are highly monochromatic (i.e. only one specific wavelength). This allows for a highly intense beam of rays with low divergence angle. As the fable goes, lasers can blind you and burn anything in their path. This is true to a very large extent and lasers are used extensively in microfabrication of high-tech products such as integrated circuits, processors and several other similar products. Lasers with a wavelength of 193nm are being used by the genius folk at Intel to produce features that are 32nm wide. This is akin to using an inch wide drill bit to produce a hole of a quarter inch in diameter. Under normal circumstances, this is near impossible. Thanks to the magic of coherence of lasers, this can be done for over a million transistors per processor for millions of processors.
The intense beam of lasers has allowed faster mass production of certain items. Laser cutting allows one to cut through many materials with high precision. Furthermore, due to the lack of moving parts or blades, the repeatability of this setup is greater with little warp. In addition to all these advantages, laser cutting is (on an average) at least 30 times more precise than traditional mechanical methods to cut materials. In the making of this newspaper, several billions of characters were etched onto thin sheets of aluminium used as masks in the printing process. This etching property of lasers is widely used in the production of optical data storage disks (such as LaserDisc, CD, DVD, BluRay, Hard Drives). The fact that you can hold upwards of 100GB on one of these disks is testimony to the importance of lasers.
Lasers will only further continue to improve in their efficiency and size. The growing field of optical communications and photonics means that lasers with become essential to future devices. Fiber optics have found their way into houses with TOSLINK cables, Thunderbolt and other such similar technology. As electrical data transfer rates are reaching their upper limit, more people are starting to adopt fiber optics for data transfer. There are plenty more uses for lasers so here’s to lasers and what they have done for us.
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