Laser science predates the invention of the laser itself.
Albert Einstein created the foundations for the laser and
maser in 1917, via a paper in which he re-derived
Max Planck’s law of radiation using a formalism based on probability coefficients (
Einstein coefficients) for the
absorption,
spontaneous emission, and
stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The existence of stimulated emission was confirmed in 1928 by
Rudolf W. Ladenburg. In 1939, Valentin A. Fabrikant made the earliest laser proposal. He specified the conditions required for light amplification using stimulated emission. In 1947,
Willis E. Lamb and R. C. Retherford found apparent stimulated emission in hydrogen spectra and effected the first demonstration of stimulated emission; The theoretical principles describing the operation of a microwave laser (a maser) were first described by
Nikolay Basov and
Alexander Prokhorov at the
All-Union Conference on Radio Spectroscopy in May 1952. The first maser was built by
Charles H. Townes,
James P. Gordon, and
Herbert J. Zeiger in 1953. Townes, Basov and Prokhorov were awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for their research in the field of stimulated emission.
Arthur Ashkin,
Gérard Mourou, and
Donna Strickland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics. The first working laser (a pulsed
ruby laser) was demonstrated on May 16, 1960, by
Theodore Maiman at the
Hughes Research Laboratories. ==See also==