The Photon
In Our Time: Science
00:00
The Process of Laser Light Emission
One of the key processes behind how a laser works is a process called stimulated emission of radiation which was originally proposed by Einstein. He decided that there must be actually two processes by which something that was excited could lose, could emit a photon. But in fact it's the stimulated emission caused by the photon that's important to lasers. We have to do a few tricks with that because obviously if we're getting a lot of photons emitted we need to send electrons back up to higher levels to re-emit photons so we have to produce more excited atoms than we have on excited atoms but essentially that can give us the laser light radiation.
Transcript
Play full episode
