15.3 Lasers

Stimulated emission

Stimulated emission occurs when a photon interacts with an excited atom, causing the atom to decay and emit another identical photon.

How a laser works

A laser works by a process called stimulated emission - as you can tell from what `laser' stands for! You can imagine that stimulated emission can lead to more and more identical photons being released in the following way: Imagine we have an electron in an excited metastable state and it drops down to the ground state by emitting a photon. If this photon then travels through the material and meets another electron in the metastable excited state this will cause the electron to drop down to the lower energy level and another photon to be emitted. Now there are two photons of the same energy. If these photons then both move through the material and each interacts with another electron in a metastable state, this will result in them each causing an additional photon to be released. i.e. from 2 photons we then get 4, and so on! This is how laser light is produced.

This can only happen if there are many electrons in a metastable state. If most of the electrons are in the ground state, then they will just absorb the photons and no extra photons will be emitted. However, if more electrons are in the excited metastable state than in the ground state, then the process of stimulated emission will be able to continue. Usually in atoms, most of the electrons are in the lower energy levels and only a few are in excited states. When most of the electrons are in the excited metastable state and only a few are in the ground state, this is called population inversion (the populations in the excited and ground states are swapped around) and this is when stimulated emission can occur. To start off the process, the electrons first have to be excited up into the metastable state. This is done using an external energy source.

Population inversion

Population inversion is when more atoms are in an excited state than in their ground state. It is a necessary condition to sustain a laser beam, so that there are enough excited atoms that can be stimulated to emit more photons.