Bell Labs Showcase Museum Tour - The Laser

The Nokia Bell Labs Showcase Museum is at Murray Hill, New Jersey; and I am one of the tour guides. Bell Labs ground-breaking inventions include Sound Movies, Digital Imaging, Information Sciences, Radio Astronomy, Lasers, Satellite Communications, Integrated Circuits, and Transistor, among others. In this Episode of the Bell Labs Showcase Museum Tour, I’ll focus on Lasers. I explain how Lasers work through the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission principles. Electrons in a medium absorb energy from light (absorption), and then emit a photon when they return to their ground state. This Spontaneous emission is a quantum-mechanical effect and a direct physical manifestation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I’ll show you a page from the notebook of Gordon Gould who coined the term Laser originally an acronym: “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”. I’ll describe for you the different kinds of lasers today (Gas, Solid State, Metal Vapor, Excimer, Dye and Diode). The Application of Lasers in various industries, the Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC), Heterostructure Lasers, and Quantum Well Lasers. Today, Quantum Well Lasers are the basic active element (laser-light source) of the Internet's fiber-optic communication backbone. My videographer: Ken Jonach Enjoy! -Ben