Zap! How to make a REALLY intense laser beam
Lasers. We use them for communications, surgery, law enforcement, entertainment, printing, engraving, measuring, researching … the list of applications is seemingly endless.
They’ve been on the scene since the early 1960s when researchers first started theorising and experimenting with compressed, controlled beams of light energy. During the first few years since their invention, development of more powerful pulsed lasers continued rapidly.
But then researchers hit a wall. The powerful lasers they were trying to build had a nasty habit of damaging the machinery being used to generate them. Progress stalled for over a decade. Then, in the mid-1980’s, Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou came up with a new way to make lasers that changed everything … and in 2018, their work was recognised with a Nobel Prize for Physics (alongside Arthur Ashkin’s development of ‘optical tweezers’ – more laser physics).
