History of Lasers Timeline

The first chemical laser was demonstrated in 1965 by Jerome V. V. Kasper and George C. Pimentel. In chemical lasers such as the hydrogen fluoride laser (2700–2900 nm) and the deuterium fluoride laser (3800 nm), the pumping reaction is the combination of hydrogen or deuterium gas with combustion products of ethylene in nitrogen trifluoride.

In 1970, Zhores Alferov in the USSR and Izuo Hayashi and Morton Panish of Bell Labs independently developed room-temperature, continual-operation diode lasers using the heterojunction structure, enabling practical semiconductor lasers.

Lasing without maintaining the medium excited into a population inversion was demonstrated in 1992 in sodium gas, and again in 1995 in rubidium gas, by various international teams, expanding understanding of lasing mechanisms.

In 2015, researchers made a white laser whose light is modulated by a synthetic nanosheet made out of zinc, cadmium, sulfur, and selenium. It can emit red, green, and blue light in varying proportions, with each wavelength spanning 191 nm.

In 2017, researchers at the Delft University of Technology demonstrated an AC Josephson junction microwave laser, a novel type of maser operating at microwave frequencies using superconducting circuits.

In 2017, researchers at the Technical University of Munich demonstrated the smallest mode locking laser capable of emitting pairs of phase-locked picosecond laser pulses with a repetition frequency up to 200 GHz.

In 2017, researchers from the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), together with US researchers from JILA, a joint institute of NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder, established a new world record by developing an erbium-doped fiber laser with a linewidth of only 10 millihertz.

A 10 PW (10×10¹⁵ W) laser, the world's most powerful as of 2019, began operating at the ELI-NP facility in Măgurele, Romania, pushing the frontiers of extreme-intensity laser science.

Image source: Extreme Light Infrastructure

The first widely noticeable use of lasers came with the supermarket barcode scanner, introduced in 1974, bringing laser technology into everyday consumer life for the first time.

The laserdisc player, introduced in 1978, was the first successful consumer product to include a laser, paving the way for later laser-based consumer electronics.

Image source: LaserDisc

The compact disc player became the first laser-equipped device to become common when it was commercialized in 1982, followed shortly by laser printers, cementing lasers in mass-market consumer products.

Image source: CD player

As of 2005, only 850 nm VCSELs were widely available, with 1300 nm VCSELs beginning to be commercialized and 1550 nm devices being an area of research, reflecting progress in vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser technology.

Image source: Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser

In 2012, Nichia and OSRAM developed and manufactured commercial high-power green laser diodes (515/520 nm), which compete with traditional diode-pumped solid-state lasers.

A 60 kW laser weapon system called HELIOS, described as "six welding lasers strapped together," has been under development for destroyer-class ships as of 2020, demonstrating military applications of high-energy lasers.

Image source: AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System

Global industrial laser sales reached $21.85 billion in 2023, reflecting the enormous growth of the laser industry since its beginnings in 1960. By comparison, in 2004 approximately 131,000 lasers were sold, excluding diode lasers, valued at US$2.19 billion.