Feature
Beyond the Beam: A History of Multidimensional Lasers
For the past half century, both scientists and the public have come to think of lasers as producing line-like beams. Yet there’s nothing about the laser that requires light emission to occur in a single dimension. Though initially forgotten and ignored, multidimensional lasers may define the next era of the technology’s evolution.
The crossing of 1-D and 3-D lights.
If one carefully reads the history of the maser and its transformation into the laser (1954-1960), it is clear that, in the beginning, line-like, one-dimensional emission was never a target for, nor a fundamental requirement of, the laser—except, of course, in the brilliant science fiction of H.G. Wells and Aleksey Tolstoy.
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