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MTSLTMSB,: Masers For of Is Like 'Light' First

Masers were an early precursor to lasers that used stimulated emission of radiation to amplify microwaves rather than light. They represented the first quantum mechanical system that achieved amplification and were independently invented in the 1950s by Townsend, Basov, and Prokhorov, who received the 1964 Nobel Prize. Masers were initially used as low-noise microwave amplifiers but are now only of historical interest. One example used ruby as the gain medium, where the energy levels of chromium ions could be tuned by applying a magnetic field due to the spin and orbital contributions to the system.

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Nurul Fahmi Arief
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19 views1 page

MTSLTMSB,: Masers For of Is Like 'Light' First

Masers were an early precursor to lasers that used stimulated emission of radiation to amplify microwaves rather than light. They represented the first quantum mechanical system that achieved amplification and were independently invented in the 1950s by Townsend, Basov, and Prokhorov, who received the 1964 Nobel Prize. Masers were initially used as low-noise microwave amplifiers but are now only of historical interest. One example used ruby as the gain medium, where the energy levels of chromium ions could be tuned by applying a magnetic field due to the spin and orbital contributions to the system.

Uploaded by

Nurul Fahmi Arief
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Masers

315

Fig.12.24

30

40

Phase matching angle (degrees)

Theoretical (solid lines) and experimental (O and a) tunine curves using BBO as the nonlinear medium.

fibre communication system. Without them the World Wide Web could have hardly come into existence.

12.11 Masers
The acronym stands for 'microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation'. It is like 'laser' but the word 'light' has been replaced by 'microwave'- In fact, the microwave application was there first, well before lasers. Masers represented the first fwo-state systems in which quantum
mechanical principles were used to achieve amplification. They were invented independently by Townsend in the United States and Basov and Prokhorov in the Soviet Union. All three received a Nobel Prize in 1964. For a while m:rsers were used as low-noise amplifiers (e.g. in the first satellite communications across the Atlantic), but nowadays they are only of historical interest. It is worthwhile, though, to mention here one of their realizations as an example of magnetic tuning.

When discussing paramagnetism in Section 11.7, we came across the splitting of energy levels in an applied magnetic field. The possible energies
are given by eqn ( I 1 .41 ):

: -MtSltmsB, Mt : J,J - 1,...,-J.

(t2.s2)
* There is some theoretical justifrcation for doing so, but the real reason is that unless orbital momentum is disregarded, there is no resemblance at all between theory and experiment.

The material used is ruby, which happens to be good both for lasers and masers. For trebly ionized chromium, the outer 3d-shell has three electrons of identical spin. Hence its total spin contribution is 312. The contribution from orbital angular momentum is taken as zero,* thus j : 3/2, Ieading

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