Extended Interviews
For its May 2020 feature article “The Laser at 60,” OPN interviewed OSA Fellows working in a variety of areas of laser technology to get a reading on the laser’s progress, six decades after its initial demonstration. During the first two weeks of May, we’ll be posting extended versions of a selection of these interviews online on OPN’s daily news site. Check back there during the month—or follow us on OPN Twitter or OSA Facebook for word of the Q&As as they’re posted.
| Date | Interviewee |
| 1 May 2020 | Robert Byer |
| 4 May 2020 | Ursula Keller |
| 6 May 2020 | Ruxin Li |
| 8 May 2020 | Constance Chang-Hasnain |
| 11 May 2020 | John Bowers |
| 13 May 2020 | Teri Odom |
| 15 May 2020 | Wilhelm Kaenders |
References and Resources
Maiman’s original 16 May 1960 laser demonstration:
- T.H. Maiman. “Stimulated optical radiation in ruby,” Nature 187, 493 (1960)
- J. Hecht. Beam: The Race to Make the Laser (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010).
Selected papers on work discussed in “The Laser at 60”:
Terahertz laser (Federico Capasso)
- P. Chevalier et al. “Widely tunable compact terahertz gas lasers,” Science 366, 856 (2019).
Accelerator-on-a-chip/tabletop XFELs (Robert Byer)
- E.A. Peralta et al. “Demonstration of electron acceleration in a laser-driven dielectric microstructure,” Nature 503, 91 (2013).
- J. Breuer and P. Hommelhoff. “Laser-based acceleration of nonrelativistic electrons at a dielectric structure,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 134803 (2013).
- D.S. Black et al. “Net acceleration and direct measurement of attosecond electron pulses in a silicon dielectric laser accelerator,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 264802 (2019).
- N. Schönenberger et al. “Generation and characterization of attosecond microbunched electron pulse trains via dielectric laser acceleration,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 264803 (2019).
- N.V. Sapra et al. “On-chip integrated laser-driven particle accelerator,” Science 367, 79 (2020).
High-rep-rate attosecond pulses/attosecond frontier (Ursula Keller)
- H.R. Telle et al. “Carrier-envelope offset phase control: A novel concept for absolute optical frequency measurement and ultrashort pulse generation,” Appl. Phys. B 69, 327 (1999).
- J. Fuchs et al. “Time delays from one-photon transitions in the continuum,” Optica 7, 154 (2020).
- J. Pupeikis et al. “Water window soft x-ray source enabled by a 25 W few-cycle 2.2 µm OPCPA at 100 kHz,” Optica 7, 168 (2020).
Station of Extreme Light/petawatt lasers (Ruxin Li)
- B. Shen et al. “Exploring vacuum birefringence based on a 100 PW laser and an X-ray free electron laser beam,” Plasma Phys. Contr. Fusion 60, 044002 (2018).
- C.N. Danson et al. “Petawatt and exawatt class lasers worldwide,” High-Power Laser Sci. Eng. 7, e54 (2019).
- B. Shao et al. “Broad-bandwidth high-temporal-contrast carrier-envelope-phase-stabilized laser seed for 100 PW lasers,” Opt. Lett. 45, 2215 (2020).
VCSELS and beyond (Constance Chang-Hasnain)
- K. Iga. “Surface emitting semiconductor lasers,” IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 24, 1845 (1988).
- C. Chang-Hasnain. “Tunable VCSEL,” IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 6, 978 (2000).
- C. Chang-Hasnain. “Injection locking of VCSELs,” IEEE J. Sel. Topics Quantum Electron. 9, 1386 (2003).
- C. Chase et al. “1550 nm high contrast grating VCSEL,” Opt. Express 18, 15461 (2010).
- C. Chang-Hasnain. “High-contrast grating and its application in VCSEL array (Conference Presentation),” Proc. SPIE 11290, High Contrast Metastructures IX, 1129002 (26 March 2020).
Integrated lasers on silicon (John Bowers)
- D. Liang et al. “Integrated green DWDM photonics For next-gen high-performance computing,” in Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2020, OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, 2020), paper Th1E.2.
- B. Dong et al. “P-doping effect on external optical feedback dynamics in 1.3-μm InAs/GaAs quantum dot laser epitaxially grown on silicon,” Proc. SPIE 11356, Semiconductor Lasers and Laser Dynamics IX, 113560C (1 April 2020).
- L. Chang et al. “Ultra-efficient frequency comb generation in AlGaAs-on-insulator microresonators,” Nat. Commun. 11, 1331 (2020).
Nanolasers (Teri Odom)
- M.P. Knudson et al. “Polarization-dependent lasing behavior from low-symmetry nanocavity arrays,” ACS Nano 13, 7435 (2019).
- W. Wang et al. “Ultrafast dynamics of lattice plasmon lasers,” J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 10, 3301 (2019).
- Fernandez-Bravo et al. “Ultralow-threshold, continuous-wave upconverting lasing from subwavelength plasmons,” Nat. Mater. 18, 1172 (2019).
Previous OPN Laser Features and Articles
Selected articles on laser history
- A.J. DeMaria. “Lasers: The first 25 years,” Opt. News 11(10), 15 (October 1985).
- J.J. Ewing. “Excimer lasers at 30 years,” Opt. Photon. News 14(5), 26 (May 2003).
- R.D. Dupuis. “The diode laser: The first 30 days, 40 years ago,” Opt. Photon. News 15(4), 30 (April 2003).
- J. Hecht. “Beam: The race to make the laser,” Opt. Photon. News 16(7), 24 (July/August 2005).
- J. Hecht. “The breakthrough birth of the diode laser,” Opt. Photon. News 18(7), 38 (July/August 2007).
- J. Hecht. “History of the X-ray laser,” Opt. Photon. News 19(5), 26 (May 2008).
- J. Hecht. “Half a century of laser weapons,” Opt. Photon. News 20(2), 14 (February 2009).
- D.C. Brown and J.W. Kuper. “Solid-state lasers: Steady progress through the decades,” Opt. Photon. News 20(5), 36 (May 2009).
- S.R. Wilk. “Defunct lasers,” Opt. Photon. News 21(1), 10 (January 2010).
- J. Hecht. “History of gas lasers, part 1: Continuous-wave gas lasers,” Opt. Photon. News 21(1), 16 (January 2010).
- C. Webb. “History of gas lasers, part 2: Pulsed gas lasers,” Opt. Photon. News 21(2), 20 (February 2010).
- S.R. Wilk. “A popular history of the laser,” Opt. Photon. News 21(3), 14 (March 2010).
- J. Hecht. “Lasers and the glory days of industrial research,” Opt. Photon. News 21(5), 20 (May 2010).
- J.P. Gordon. “Reflections on the first maser,” Opt. Photon. News 21(5), 34 (May 2010).
- P. Daukantas. “A short history of laser light shows,” Opt. Photon. News 21(5), 42 (May 2010).
- J. Hecht. “Holography and the laser,” Opt. Photon. News 21(7), 34 (July/August 2010).
- J. Hecht. “How the laser launched nonlinear optics,” Opt. Photon. News 21(11), 34 (November 2010).
- Z.G. Horváth. “Beyond the beam: A history of multidimensional lasers,” Opt. Photon. News 23(7), 36 (July/August 2012).
- W.T. Silfvast. “Discovering a laser,” Opt. Photon. News 25(5), 36 (May 2014).
- J. Hecht. “How lasers got practical,” Opt. Photon. News 28(10), 42 (October 2019).
- J. Hecht. “Creating an airborne laser lab,” Opt. Photon. News 30(5), 42 (May 2019).
There’s more to come!
Note – This section is still being built. Check back here for more OPN content that sheds light on the laser’s history, and the vast range of applications and science it has opened.