65 years of laser technology
International Day of Light 2025
very year on May 16, the world celebrates the International Day of Light to commemorate a milestone in science and technology - the birth of the first laser in 1960. On this day, exactly 65 years ago, physicist Theodore H. Maiman succeeded in generating coherent light for the first time, thus winning the international race to determine the feasibility of this project.
Maiman developed a palm-sized device that laid the foundation for today's laser technology, which has since revolutionized many areas from medicine to telecommunications. The term “LASER” is an acronym and is derived from the first letters of the English description of the effect to be achieved, namely “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation”.
The world's first laser dismantled into its components. Photo: Thorsten Naeser
The original laser that Maiman built still exists. Together with his laboratory book, this historical device is on permanent loan to the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, where it is on display in the foyer.
We have taken this valuable loan as an opportunity to present the small device in a video. In addition to the history of its creation, which the video traces, physicist Dr. Matthew Weidman explains the individual components of the laser and the principle of how it works.
Incidentally, Maiman underwent laser surgery at LMU-Klinikum Großhadern in Munich in 2000 and benefited from the very technology he had been using for decades.
Click here for the video and an extended article:
photonworld.de/nc/en/magazin/featureartikel/happy-birthday-laser/fseite/1.html
And also editorial assistant Umai Galadriel Chibbaro Leiva gives us a brief insight into this here:
photonworld.de/en/basic-lectures/65-years-of-laser-technology.html
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