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About Medford mail tribune. (Medford, Or.) 1909-1989 | View Entire Issue (July 18, 1963)
2 B THURSDAY. JULY 18, 1963 MEDFORD MAIL TRIBUNE, MEDFORD, OREGON Various Beams of Light Are Made With New Lasers New York, N.Y.-(Scicntific American Feature) - Light beams of almost any desired color and intensity from infra red to ultraviolet can now be produced by lasers. According to Arthur L. Schawlow, professor of phys ics at Stanford university, ad vances in the capabilities of the laser have come so swiftly since its announcement three years ago this month that sci entists are embarrassed by their riches, and as a conse quence have scarcely begun to find applications for the in vention that promises to revo lutionize fields of application as diverse as electrical com munications and eye surgery. "By conservative estimate," Schawlow states, "500 re search groups are now engag ed in laser development and exploitation in the U.S. alone. Much of this effort is directed toward the use of laser beams in communications systems, ' The amount of information that can be carried by a com munication channel is propor- i tional to lis frequency. In principle, the visible region of the spectrum from red to blue could accommodate some 80 million television channels. The realization of this poten- tial is still far in the future. Generating the light beams is one thing. Harnessing them to carry signals is another, Out side the field of community tions - in chemistry, medicine and several other disciplines - many possible uses of a strong beam of monochromat ic laser light are being inten sively explored. First Working Laser "The first working laser, developed by T. H. Maiman three years ago, emitted only 1 pulses of deep red liRht. Its rays fascinated scientists be- r cause they vibrated at a single frequency, much as a piano emits a single note when one key is struck. Ordinary lamps emit many frequencies, com parable to the noise or dis cord that a piano would pro duce if all keys were struck In unison. The pure monochro matic light of the laser can be focused more sharply than ordinary light and beams of laser light do not spread or scatter appreciably. Moreover, lasers in effect provide means for concentrating the energy of a wide spectrum of light into a single color of great intensity. In the case of Maiman's laser this was accomplished by focusing the rays of a powerful flash lump onto a short, cigarette-sized rod of specially treated ruby. The ruby absorbed the flash and re-cmltted the concentrat ed energy as a thin red ray that could easily vaporize tungsten and olher highly re fractory substances. "It has now been found that many substances other than ruby can similarly concen trate light of other colors. The substances include exotic ele ments such ns europium, sa marium, ytterbium, and gases such as helium, krypton, xen on. "With radical advances In laser technology appearing lit erally every few days, there has been little chance to do the careful, detailed develop ment work needed to realize practical applications, Some proposed applications, particu larly military ones, require much higher output energies than those now available. Un til the efficiency and the aver age output power are increas ed, It will not be practical to uso lasers for large scale cut ting and welding. There is no apparent reason In principle why this cannot be done even tually. Rallied Application "O n e related application has already been realized: When the retina of the eye has been torn or injured, it is now possible to 'weld' the ret ina to its support by coagula tion with an Intense spot of light. The short flash Is deliv ered so abruptly that the eye does not require immobiliza tion during the treatment. Other potential applications include the triggering of chemical reactions, measuring distances, motions and time with unprecedented accuracy, and determining the nature and characteristics of sub stances that defy conventional analytical techniques. "No single laser can com bine all of the attributes nec essary to all applications. The immediate engineering task is to select the proper combina tion of properties for any pro posed application and to de sign the particular laser to fit v it. This should become in creasingly easy because one can be sure that there will continue to be surprising in novations and advances in la ser development." mmmmfMmprniyj ivirri vim mm mm jp H WX i s X,- M ;nrs 1 sV t.7fw "V Li1, ltd I umi Earn v uiv .ngJM ve at nggiy wiggiy -- . JS , s Brentwood VS. yfy ( I . 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