Century of Optics

OSA Centur y
of Optics
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OSA Century of Optics
On The Cover
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Color iStock.com/Roman Samokhin

Lasers TOPTICA Photonics AG
Spectroscopy USGS Spectroscopy Lab
LED iStock.com/BlackJack3D
Fiber optic communications subsea
cables Tyco Electronics Subsea
Communications LLC
Medical imaging iStock.com/ingram_
publishing
Biometrics iStock.com/
Photovoltaics
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Remote sensing Earth Science and Remote
Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center
Optical clock NPL
Bose-Einstein condensate NIST
Night vision iStock.com/ThunderValleyHC
Telescopes gettymages.com/Stocktrek
Laser fusion University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics, Eugene Kowaluk
Power distribution of a donut-shaped laser
beam with higher-order modes
Gary Wagner
Thermal imaging iStock.com/Vladimir
White light diffraction Victor Canalejas
Tejero, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
Data encryption iStock.com/
Danil Melekhin
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OSA History Book Committee
Paul Kelley (Chair)
Govind Agrawal
Michael Bass
Jeff Hecht
Carlos Stroud
History Book Advisory Group

Joseph H. Eberly
Stephen Fantone
John Howard
Erich Ippen
OSA Staff Contributors

Elizabeth A. Rogan, Chief Executive Ofcer
Kathryn Amatrudo, Deputy Senior Director, Membership & Education Services
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Stephanie Scuiletti, Senior Production Editor
Chris Videll, Director of Publishing Production & Technology
2010 Massachusetts Ave NW

Washington, D.C. 20036 USA
Copyright 2015 by The Optical Society (OSA). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written
permission of OSA, except where permitted by law.
ISBN: 978-1-943580-04-0
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Introduction
Paul Kelley
PRE1940
Introduction: Early Technology
Carlos Stroud
Optics in the Nineteenth Century

Jeff Hecht
11
Spectroscopy from 1916 to 1940

Patricia Daukantas
17
Government and Industrial Research Laboratories

Carlos Stroud
23
Camera History 1900 to 1940

Todd Gustavson
31
OSA and the Early Days of Vision Research

Patricia Daukantas
38
Evolution of Color Science through the Lens of OSA

Roy S. Berns
43
19411959
Introduction: Advances in Optical Science and Technology
Paul Kelley
49
Inventions and Innovations of Edwin Land

Jeff Hecht
51
Birth of Fiber-Optic Imaging and Endoscopes

Jeff Hecht
53
Xerography: an Invention That Became a Dominant Design

Mark B. Myers
57
U.S. Peacetime Strategic Reconnaissance Cameras, 19541974: Legacy of James

G. Baker and the U-2
Kevin Thompson
64
History of Optical Coatings and OSA before 1960

Angus Macleod
68
19601974
Introduction
Jeff Hecht
79
The Discovery of the Laser

Jeff Hecht
81
Table of Contents
Postwar Employment Bubble Bursts

Jeff Hecht
85
Gas LasersThe Golden Decades, 19601980

William B. Bridges
88
Discovery of the Tunable Dye Laser

Jeff Hecht
94
Remembrances of Spectra-Physics
David Hardwick
97
The Birth of the Laser Industry: Overview

Jeff Hecht
100
Lasers at American Optical and Laser Incorporated

Bill Shiner
101
Solid-State Lasers
William Krupke and Robert Byer
103
Semiconductor Diode Lasers: Early History

Marshall I. Nathan
107
Lasers and the Growth of Nonlinear Optics

Jeff Hecht
114
Early Years of Holography

Jeff Hecht
119
History of Laser Materials Processing

David A. Belforte
124
Brief History of Barcode Scanning

Jay Eastman
128
Developing the Laser Printer

Gary Starkweather
134
History of the Optical Disc

Paul J. Wehrenberg
138
Interferometric Optical Metrology

James C. Wyant
143
Half a Century of Laser Weapons

Jeff Hecht
149
KH-9 Hexagon Spy in the Sky Reconnaissance Satellite

Phil Pressel
153
CORONA Reconnaissance Satellite

Kevin Thompson
157
Laser Isotope Enrichment

Jeff Hecht
161
Lasers for Fusion Research

John Murray
166
History of Laser Remote Sensing, Laser Radar, and Lidar

Dennis K. Killinger
175
19751990
Introduction
Michael Bass
vi
Table of Contents
183
The Shift of Optics R&D Funding and Performers over the Past 100 Years
C. Martin Stickley
185
Through a Glass Brightly: Low-Loss Fibers for Optical Communications

Donald B. Keck
189
Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplier: From Flashlamps and Crystal Fibers to 10-Tb/s Communication
Michel Digonnet
195
Advent of Continuous-Wave Room-Temperature Operation of Diode Lasers

Michael Ettenberg
199
Remembering the Million Hour Laser

Richard W. Dixon
203
Terabit-per-Second Fiber Optical Communication Becomes Practical

Guifang Li
209
Applied Nonlinear Optics

G. H. C. New and J. W. Haus
213
Linear and Nonlinear Laser Spectroscopy

M. Bass and S.C. Rand
218
Optical Trapping and Manipulation of Small Particles by Laser Light Pressure

Arthur Ashkin
223
High-Power, Reliable Diode Lasers and Arrays

Dan Botez
227
Tunable Solid-State Lasers

Peter F. Moulton
232
Ultrashort-Pulse Lasers
Erich P. Ippen
237
Ground-Based Telescopes and Instruments

James Breckinridge
244
Space Telescopes for Astronomy

James Breckinridge
249
Contact Lenses for Vision Correction: A Journey from Rare to Commonplace

Ian Cox
253
Excimer Laser Surgery: Laying the Foundation for Laser Refractive Surgery
James J. Wynne
257
Intraocular Lenses: A More Permanent Alternative

Ian Cox
262
Spectacles: Past, Present, and Future

William Charman
265
Major Milestones in Liquid Crystal Display Development

Shin-Tson Wu
269
1991PRESENT
Introduction
Govind Agrawal
277
Birth and Growth of the Fiber-Optic Communications Industry

Jeff Hecht
278
Telecommunications Bubble Pumps Up the Optical Fiber Communications Conference

Jeff Hecht
282
Table of Contents
vii
The Evolution of Optical Communications Networks since 1990

Rod C. Alferness
287
Integrated Photonics
Radhakrishnan Nagarajan
293
New Wave Microstructured Optical Fibers

Philip Russell
297
Ultrafast-Laser Technology from the 1990s to Present

Wayne H. Knox
304
Biomedical Optics: In Vivo and In Vitro Applications

Gregory Faris
308
Novel Optical Materials in the Twenty-First Century

David J. Hagan and Steven C. Moss
315
Quantum Information Science: Emerging No More

Carlton M. Caves
320
THE FUTURE
Far Future of Fibers
Philip Russell
327
View of the Future of Light

Steven Chu
329
The 100-Year Future for Optics

Joesph H. Eberly
331
Future of Energy
Eli Yablonovitch
332
Future of Displays
Byoungho Lee
333
Biomedical OpticsThe Next 100 Years

Rox Anderson
334
Lasers and Laser Applications

Robert L. Byer
336
Optical Communications: The Next 100 Years

Alan Willner
338
INDEX
341
viii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Introduction
Paul Kelley
his book describes progress in optics during the period from 1916 to 2016, the rst
hundred years of The Optical Society (OSA). Before we begin, let us consider how much
the rate of advancement has increased over this period. A sense of this can be found in the
OSA membership and publication statistics. There were 30 Charter Members in 1916, and in
1917 the membership was 74. The Society grew in the 1920s, but in the depression decade of the
1930s the membership was fairly static at about 650. The membership rose sharply with the
onset of World War II, roughly doubling by the end of the war. Government funding of science
and technology and the increased use of optics in industry stimulated further growth so that by
1960, the year of the laser, the membership stood at 2600. The development of the laser further
enhanced this growth, and by the ftieth anniversary of the Society in 1966 there were 4500
members. In the 1980s, OSA passed the 10,000 member mark, and today the organization has
19,000 members. The Society has endeavored to include all of optics. However, for a number of
reasons, including growth and divergence of interests, several subelds have left the organization.
Because of this it is hard to do justice here to some topics in optics.
While this volume does not intend to discuss progress in optics before 1916 in any depth, it is
useful to consider where the eld stood at the beginning of the period. Optics is the science and
technology of light. As such, it is concerned with the generation, manipulation, and use of light.
Light and the tools of optics are our principal means of directly sensing our world and allow us to
vastly expand our knowledge of the universe and the microscopic world. While optics has a very
long history, its inuence became particularly strong toward the end the nineteenth century. The
invention of the electric light changed the way we lived by extending our nighttime activities of
work, study, and pleasure. Eyeglasses, still and motion picture cameras, and other optical
instruments had widespread impact on our lives. The industries that provided these devices set
the stage for the founding of OSA.
The development of optical spectroscopy led in 1913 to Bohrs quantum theory of the atom.
At about the same time, Einsteins theory of blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect gave
us an understanding of the quantization of light. The extension of quantum mechanics into
molecular physics and condensed matter physics provided the basis for much of the progress in
twentieth century physical science and technology, including the invention and development of
the laser.
At the start of OSA, principal areas of interest to OSA members included optical instruments, vision, optical materials, lens technology, theoretical optics, and the photographic
process. The practical nature of most of these subjects reected the backgrounds of the founders.
In the 1920s and 1930s spectroscopic instrumentation was under rapid development. The use of
photocells with vacuum tube ampliers overcame many of the limitations of photographic
recording of spectra. New photocathode materials were developed to extend spectra ranges, and
the photomultiplier tube was invented in 1934. Silver-halide-based photographic materials were
developed with improved sensitivity and spectral range, and color photography became practical
and widespread. CCD image sensors replaced lm in the 1990s, bringing further improvement in
sensitivity and dynamic range in photography. World War II saw the development of innovative
camera lens designs for use in reconnaissance and the widespread use of antireection coatings.
During the war, infrared spectroscopy became vital in the production of articial rubber and
custom fuels. Analytical instrumentation using spectroscopy spread rapidly in the chemical
3
industry at the end of the war. This period also saw the introduction of new civilian applications of
optics such as instant photography, the Xerox copier, and the ber endoscope.
Astronomy has seen a number of innovations in the last hundred years. The Schmidt wide-eld-ofview camera was invented in 1930, and early versions were built at Hamburg Observatory and Palomar
Observatory in the mid-1930s. The Schmidt camera and various variants are widely used in sky
surveys, and a modied version was designed to track earth satellites. As astronomical telescopes
became larger to provide greater light-gathering power and resolution, stability and weight of
monolithic reectors became serious problems. A segmented-mirror telescope design was proposed
in 1977, two versions of which have been operated at Mauna Kea since the early 1990s. Since then,
more segmented telescopes have been deployed by astronomers. Laser guide stars are being used to
correct the optical wavefront for effects of atmospheric turbulence. The Hubble telescope, which uses a
Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrain wide-eld design, has been operating in earth orbit since 1990.
One of the most important uses of light is illumination. While Edisons incandescent lamp was a
welcome replacement for gas and oil lamps, it was inefcient and not very long lasting. The
uorescent lamp was commercialized in the 1930s. The need for 24-hour production in wartime
factories led to the widespread use of uorescent lighting, and by the early 1950s it had surpassed
incandescent lighting in the United States. In order to reduce energy consumption, new uorescent
lamp congurations were designed in the 1990s to mimic the incandescent lamp. Today uorescent
lighting is being replaced by even more efcient LED lighting. First developed as a cousin of the
semiconductor laser in the 1960s, LEDs were not considered useful for illumination because of the
absence of a blue source. This problem was solved in the mid-1990s. When fully deployed, the
worldwide energy savings will be about 5 PWh/yr.
1960 began the age of the laser. The rst laser had ruby as the active medium. Other pulsed solidstate lasers were developed that year, and in December came the HeNe laser, the rst continuously
operating system. After that, new lasers were invented at a rapid pace, including high-power gas lasers
at wavelengths from the infrared to the ultraviolet as well as continuously operating solid-state lasers.
Most lasers used optical or electrical excitation (pumping) of the active medium. Perhaps the most
signicant early (1962) invention was the semiconductor diode laser, which operated with very high
efciency through electrical excitation. After considerable development, continuous operation was
achieved at room temperature, cementing the great practical value of this system. While individual
semiconductor lasers were not particularly powerful, they were small and could be fabricated in oneand two-dimensional arrays for use in optical pumping. Broadly tunable lasers were invented; early
ones used dyes but were supplanted by solid-state systems. The tunable laser was valuable for general
spectroscopy and is essential in ultrafast science. Diode-pumped rare-earth ber lasers have successfully
competed with gas lasers for a number of high-power industrial applications.
Because of the availability of lasers as sources of very intense light, it became possible to induce a
nonlinear response of material to radiation. Following the rst report of second harmonic generation in
1961, many nonlinear phenomena were observed, including stimulated inelastic light scattering,
parametric oscillation and amplication, and self-action (four-wave mixing) effects. Parametric
processes have been important in the understanding of entanglement and other quantum optics
phenomena. Octave frequency combs and optical solitons are a consequence of self-action. Nonlinear
frequency conversion is often used to extend the wavelength range of laser radiation.
Over the fty-plus years since 1960, the laser has seen a wide variety of applications. Military uses
include laser targeting and tracking; laser weapons have also been tested. In nuclear energy, lasers have
been built to test concepts in inertial connement fusion and for uranium isotope separation. Industrial
lasers such as CO2, diode-pumped solid-state, and diode-pumped ber lasers are used for welding,
marking, machining, and other industrial processes, representing business of greater than $2 billion
dollars per year. This is about 25% of the laser market. Applications such as ber optical communication, optical storage, photolithography, and laser printing are on a similar scale. Access to worldwide
information at very high bandwidth has changed the way people work and live in many ways. The
Internet, cable television, video on demand, cell phone networks, and many other information sources
depend on ber optical connectivity. Fabrication of microelectronic devices with feature sizes
approaching 10 nm using excimer laser lithography has led to a mass market for inexpensive, powerful
4
Introduction
computers. Sales of microprocessor-based devices approach a trillion dollars per year. In medical optics,
lasers are used in a variety of diagnostic and therapeutic applications, including refractive surgery of the
eye (LASIK) and optical coherence tomography.
While it is hard to predict the future, it is apparent that rapid progress in optical science and
technology is continuing. New ways of generating and applying ultrashort pulses are being found.
Novel ber structures and plasmonic devices are being actively studied. As nanofabrication techniques
are developed, it seems possible that a variety of sub-wavelength optical devices will be made. Such
devices would function much like electronic devices. Optics should continue to play an important role
in our understanding of the theory of entangled states and the development of quantum computing and
quantum cryptography.
Introduction
PRE1940
19411959
19601974
19751990
1991PRESENT
PRE-1940

Carlos Stroud
his section of our centennial history of optics addresses two tasks: setting the stage by
describing the situation at the beginning of our highlighted period, and then summarizing
the changes that occurred. The beginning and end of our period are both quite special
years in political and economic history. The United States was just entering the Great War, as
World War I was called in 1916; and in 1940 it was on the inevitable path leading to its entry into
World War II. It is not an exaggeration to say that the course of civilization was dramatically
altered by each of these events, and the course of optical research and technology was no less
altered.
In a very real sense modern instrumental optics began in a series of developments in
Germany led by Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe, and Otto Schott. In his essay Jeff Hecht reviews these
and other earlier developments that formed the basis for the rapid developments in our eld in
the rst half of the twentieth century. The dawn of the new century found Germany recently
unied and growing quickly in industrial output, Great Britain at the peak of her imperial era,
and the United States, fresh from its victory in the SpanishAmerican War, rapidly becoming the
worlds leading industrial power. Technical inventions such as a practical light bulb, the
telegraph and telephone, phonograph, motion picture camera, and projector changed the way
people lived. There was a great deal of optimism looking forward to the new century of
continued progress. There were a series of worlds fairs and exhibitions in which the latest
inventions were touted. Perley G. Nutting, the prime mover in the founding of The Optical
Society, apparently constructed the very rst neon sign and exhibited it at the Louisiana Purchase
Exhibition in 1904, proudly proclaiming NEON in glowing light.
It was in this heady environment that optics entered the twentieth century. Optics was
centrally involved in two scientic revolutions that shook condence in the foundations of the old
Newtonian science that had served the science and industry of the nineteenth century so well:
Einsteins relativity and quantum mechanics. Patricia Daukantas reviews the advances in
spectroscopy up to 1940 and their importance to the development of quantum theory and
astronomy. Today it is difcult to imagine carrying out precision spectroscopic measurements
without a laser, a computer, or a photomultiplier or photodiode. Photographic plates had to
sufce, unless you used Albert Michelsons technique of calibrating dark-adapted students. That
proved adequate for him to resolve the 1.7 GHz ground state hyperne splitting of sodium by
measuring the drop-off of the visibility of the fringes in his interferometer illuminated by
uorescence from sodium. By 1940 the new quantum theory was in place, and Paul Dirac and
Erwin Schrdinger had developed a quantum version of electrodynamics. The basic ideas
underlying modern quantum optics were in place awaiting the development of optical technology
that would allow controlled experiments one atom and one photon at a time. As we will see in
later chapters in this volume, these technological developments followed in the second half of the
twentieth century following the development of the laser.
Prior to the twentieth century, science and engineering were carried out mostly by university
professors and amateur scientists working mostly alone with only their own funds or perhaps a
rich patrons municent interest. This changed completely in the new century, rst by the
establishment of a number of industrial and governmental research laboratories, and then by
governmental science and engineering funding agencies following World War II. I review the
founding of these laboratories and their central importance to twentieth century optics.
9
A very important optical industry has a history that almost exactly spans the rst century of the
existence of The Optical Society: lm-based photography. Todd Gustavson recounts the history of
photography, concentrating particularly on the rst 40 years of the twentieth century. A lot of optical
instrumentation is fairly specialized in its application, with but a few thousand to a few tens of
thousands of units sold. With the introduction of George Eastmans Brownie camera in 1900, optics
became mass market with sales of hundreds of thousands to millions. The economics of optics was
completely changed, and with that technology changed equally rapidly.
A second mass-market development in optics was the production of affordable eyeglasses. Bausch
and Lomb sold 20 million in 1903, and American Optical was not far behind. This supported rapid
progress in vision research, which Patricia Daukantas reviews. From the founding of OSA to today this
has remained a central concern of the Society and its members. As the average human lifespan increased
due to improvements in sanitation, nutrition, and medical science, age-related vision problems became
more important, and this eld of optics responded with rapid developments.
The development of color photography and color printing as mass industries required standardization of color measurements and the development of a better understanding of color vision. Roy Berns
recounts these developments with particular emphasis on the role of OSA and its committees.
This series of essays takes us up to the beginning of World War II, after which the climate for
research and development in optics changed dramatically into something approximating its current
form.
10
PRE-1940

Jeff Hecht
he nineteenth century laid the foundation for modern optics and for the establishment of
The Optical Society in 1916. Optical science had come a long way from Newtons
pioneering Optiks, but much remained to be learned. In 1800 Newtons particle theory
of light still held sway, the interference of light had not been recognized, and the rest of the
electromagnetic spectrum was undiscovered. Only the wealthy and elite used spectacles, poor
glass quality limited the use of refractive optics, and the worlds largest telescope was a 1.2-m
reector built by William Herschel in 1789 that required frequent repolishing.
Wave Nature of Light

A landmark experiment at the start of the nineteenth century shaped the course of optical science.
Thomas Young showed that light passing through two parallel slits interfered to produce regularly
spaced dark and light zones. In 1803, he told the Royal Society that the light was made of waves,
not particles, as Newton had written in Optiks more than a century earlier.
Another new discovery came in 1808, when Etienne-Louis Malus found that turning a
birefringent calcite crystal changed the reection he saw from nearby windows. Malus called the
effect polarization but thought he could explain it by considering light as particles. David
Brewster studied polarized reection in more detail and showed its connection to a materials
refractive index, but he did not think wave theory was needed.
Acceptance of wave theory took time. In 1818, Augustin-Jean Fresnel used diffraction
theory to explain interference as a wave phenomenon. A few years later, Fresnel showed that
polarization could be explained only if light consisted of transverse waves. Other research
bolstered the case for waves, which became the standard theory of light. But a big question
remained: how could light waves travel through space?
Nineteenth century physicists thought the logical answer was through an invisible medium
called the ether, which permeated space. Christiaan Huygens had proposed it as part of his wave
theory, before Newton published Optiks. Waves in the ether t with Fresnels theory of
diffraction. In 1820, Fresnel showed that transverse waves in the ether could explain polarization. But the nature of the ether was hard to fathom and would become a major debate for the
rest of the century as physicists continued discovering new effects.
A series of experiments in the early 1800s showed that electricity and magnetism were closely
related effects. In 1845, Michael Faraday found that magnetic elds could affect light passing
through certain materials. He later suggested that light was a transverse vibration of electric- and
magnetic-eld lines.
James Clerk Maxwell built on those observations when he developed his theory of
electromagnetism in 1860. Noting that light seemed to travel at the same speed as the forces
of electricity and magnetism, Maxwell concluded that all three propagated in the same medium
at a xed velocitythe speed of light. That made light a form of electromagnetic radiation, which
Heinrich Hertz conrmed experimentally in 1887 and 1888.
However, a nagging problem had emerged with Maxwells assumption that the ether was a xed
reference frame for the universe. If that was the case, the Earth had to be moving relative to the ether,
and that motion should be detectable as an ether wind by measuring the speed of light in two
11
orthogonal directions at the same time.

Optical techniques were the most sensitive probes available. Yet no one
could measure any difference.
In 1887, Albert Michelson
teamed with Edward Morley using
an extraordinarily sensitive interferometer in which a beamsplitter divided light between its two orthogonal
arms (Fig. 1). In theory, it was sensitive enough to spot the ether wind
if an absolute reference frame
existed. But they could not measure
Fig. 1. Milestone MichelsonMorely experiment was conducted in a
any difference in the speed of light in
basement at what was then the Case Institute of Technology. Courtesy
the two directions. That inability to
of Special Collections and Archives Department, Nimitz Library, U.S.
conrm an absolute reference frame
Naval Academy.
would leave physicists scratching
their heads for many years.
Hertzs experiments also found something unexpected: metal electrodes emitted sparks more easily
if ultraviolet light illuminated the metal. That began looking odder after J. J. Thomson discovered the
electron in 1897 and found that ultraviolet light was helping evaporate electrons from the metal surface,
the photoelectric effect that Hertz had seen. But the sparks were not ying as expected. If light waves
gradually deposited energy until the electrons soaked up enough to escape, any wavelength should
sufce. But experiments showed that the electrons were freed only if the wavelength was shorter than a
value that depended on the metalas if light was made up of particles carrying an amount of energy
inversely dependent on the wavelength.
Yet another complication emerged when Lord Rayleigh used classical physics to analyze blackbody
radiation in 1900 and found that energy emissions should increase toward innity as the wavelength
decreased toward zero. Max Planck empirically resolved that ultraviolet catastrophe the following
year by assuming that light could be emitted or absorbed only in discrete quanta. But not even Planck
himself knew at the time what that meant.
Albert Einstein found the answers in his annus mirabilis papers of 1905. To explain the
photoelectric effect, he proposed that light could be absorbed or emitted only as quanta, or chunks of
energy, as Planck had proposed to account for blackbody emission. That paper led to the wave-particle
duality of light and earned Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. His theory of special relativity
explained the failure of the MichelsonMorley experiment by stating that the speed of light was the
same in all inertial reference frames. Later, Einstein wrote that the experiment resulted in a verdict of
death to the theory of a calm ether-sea through which all matter moves [1]. The Michelson
interferometer remains a remarkably sensitive instrument and today is at the heart of the Advanced
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), which was to begin a new search for
gravity waves in 2015.
Spectroscopy and Atomic Physics

Fresnels use of wave theory to calculate the diffraction of light gave physicists the rst direct way to
measure wavelength. Prisms had long been used to display the spectrum, and in 1814 Joseph von
Fraunhofer incorporated one into a spectroscope to measure light absorption and emission lines
(Fig. 2). In 1821, he assembled a diffraction grating made of many parallel wires and found that
diffraction from the regularly spaced lines could be used to measure the wavelengths of light directly.
Spectroscopy brought new ways to identify atoms and molecules by looking at emission lines from
bright ames or at the dark absorption lines from cool gases. In 1853 Anders ngstrm showed that hot
gases emitted at the same lines that they absorbed when cold. In the 1860s, Gustav Robert Kirchhoff and
12
Fig. 2.
Joseph von Fraunhofer demonstrates the spectroscope [13].
Robert Bunsen matched wavelengths that they measured in the lab with solar lines (Fig. 3). Astronomers
William and Margaret Huggins then showed that stellar spectra included lines found in sunlight, and they
measured the Doppler shift of Sirius, the rst stellar motion detected on Earth.
Spectroscopy also opened a new window on atomic physics. In 1885, Swiss mathematician Johann
Balmer discovered a numerical pattern in a series of visible hydrogen wavelengths measured by ngstrm.
The wavelengths were equal to a constant multiplied by the quantity n2 n2 22 where n was an integer.
Balmer used the formula to predict additional wavelengths in the ultraviolet, which William Huggins
and Hermann Wilhelm Vogel conrmed in the
spectra of white stars. Later, Johannes Rydberg
developed a more general formula that explained
other series of lines.
Those patterns remained a mystery until Niels
Bohr recognized them as transitions between a
limited number of electron orbits in the hydrogen
atom and then developed the Bohr model of
hydrogen in 1913, a major step on the road to
quantum theory.
Optical Instruments
The poor quality of optical glass limited optical
instruments at the start of the nineteenth century.
In 1757, John Dollond had combined crown and
int glass to make the rst achromatic lens, but he
lacked high-quality glass and accurate dispersion
measurements. Eighteenth century astronomers
had turned to reectors for a better view of the
sky. The worlds largest telescope in 1800 was a
reector with a 1.26-m mirror and 12-m focal
Fig. 3. Astronomical spectroscopy in the nineteenth

century required attaching a spectrometer to the
telescope and viewing the dispersed spectrum with
the eye [14].
13
length built by William Herschel. But the telescopes huge size and the poor reectivity of its
easily tarnished speculum mirror limited its use.
Glass quality improved in the early nineteenth
century after Swiss craftsman Pierre Louis
Guinand tried stirring molten glass with clay
rods rather than wood to remove bubbles.
Fraunhofer used such glass to build a 24-cm
telescope for the Dorpat Observatory in 1824. It
was the rst modern achromatic refractor, and
Wilhelm Struve used it to survey over 120,000
stars [4].
Astronomers came to prefer the high optical
quality of refractors. William Parsons built the
largest telescope of the century at his estate in
Ireland around a three-ton, 1.8-m mirror, and the
Leviathan was used from 1845 to about 1890
[5]. But refractors were more productive.
In 1847 the Harvard College Observatory
installed a 15-in. (38 cm) refractor built by Mehr
and Mahler of Munich (Fig. 4). It was a twin to
one built in 1839 for the Pulkovo Observatory
that Struve had just established in Russia, and the
Fig. 4. Harvard 15-in. refractor installed in 1847 was
pair were the worlds largest refractors for some
the worlds largest refractor for two decades. Courtesy of
the Harvard College Observatory.
20 years. The Harvard great refractor remains
in the observatory on the Harvard campus, where
it is used for public observing nights. Later in the century, Alvan Clark and Sons in the U.S. was
famed for big refractors. They built the 36-in. (91-cm) Lick Telescope, which was the worlds largest
refractor in 1887 when it was installed on Mount Hamilton, near Santa Cruz, California. The Clarks
also made the 40-in. (1.02-m) lens for the Yerkes Observatory in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, nished
in 1897, which was among the rst telescopes used primarily for photography and spectroscopy.
Better glass and achromatic lenses also revolutionized microscopy. Joseph Jackson Lister, father of
the Joseph Lister who pioneered antiseptic surgery, redesigned the microscope with achromatic optics
in 1830, and his design was used widely for many years.
The birth of modern optical microscopes came from the partnership formed in Jena, Germany, by
Professor Ernst Abbe and instrument maker Carl Zeiss in 1866. They analyzed and rened the design
of lenses, microscopes, and illumination systems for six years, leading to Abbes publication of his
theory of microscopic imaging, and Zeisss later introduction of 17 microscope objectives based on
that theory [6].
Finding that glass quality limited performance of those microscopes, Abbe teamed with Otto
Schott in 1881 to develop new glasses and improve their uniformity. That led to the formation of
Schott and Sons in Jena, which in 1886 introduced the apochromat objective, which reached Abbes
theoretical limit of resolution [7]. Schotts new glasses also enhanced the optical quality of Porro
prisms, allowing production of the rst high-performance modern binoculars in 1894.
Spread of Spectacles
Although Benjamin Franklin is famed for inventingor at least popularizingbifocals in 1784, few
people of his time wore spectacles. They were expensive, and visual science was not advanced enough to
give a precise correction.
Thomas Young has been called the father of physiological optics based on his 1801 paper On the
mechanism of the eye [8,9]. He developed an optometer to measure visual accommodation, analyzed
14
peripheral vision, and discovered astigmatismpreviously unknownin his own eyes. However, it took
time to apply his insights. Only in 1827 were corrective lenses used to correct astigmatism in the eyes of
George Airy, who measured his own eyes and had an optician make the lenses [10].
Spectacles spread slowly at rst. In 1853, young German immigrant John Jacob Bausch found little
business when he hung out his shingle as an optician in Rochester. In time, he took in a partner,
Henry Lomb, and after Lomb returned from the Civil War, their company became Bausch and Lomb,
Optician.
Business picked up after the war ended. German physicist and physiologist Hermann Helmholtz
had advanced optical science by inventing the ophthalmoscope in 1851 and writing his three-volume
Handbook of Physiological Optics, which The Optical Society had translated into English in the 1920s
[11]. Furthermore, new technology was bringing down costs.
Bausch and Lomb introduced eyeglass frames made of vulcanite rubber, a material much less
expensive than wire- or horn-rimmed glasses. Demand soared. The American Optical Company,
founded in Southbridge, Massachusetts, by merging smaller companies dating back to 1833, specialized
in steel eyeglass frames, rst developed in 1843 by local jeweler William Beecher, who was frustrated by
cheap imports.
The companies soon expanded. American Optical was one of the rst U.S. spectacle rms to start
making their own lenses in 1883. They started making other lenses a decade later [12]. Bausch and
Lomb began making microscopes in 1876, photographic lenses in 1880 [13], shutters in 1888, and their
own spectacle lenses in 1889. Meanwhile, Europe began importing American-made vulcanite frames.
By the waning years of the nineteenth century, photography also was emerging as an important
consumer market for optics. Photography depends on light-sensitive materials, and early processes for
exposing and developing such materials had been complex, requiring bulky cameras, heavy glass plates,
and chemical processing. That changed after a Rochester bookkeeper named George Eastman took up
photography as a hobby in 1878.
Eastman started with wet-process plates but became intrigued by a new dry process based on
gelatin, and he went to London to learn more about it. That led him to invent a new plate-coating
machine, and in 1880 he opened a business making dry plates. In 1884 he introduced a exible lightsensitive lm on an oiled-paper base. He opened the oodgates to popular photography by announcing
the rst Kodak camera in 1888, followed in 1889 by a new transparent lm on a cellulose nitrate base
that quickly supplanted his earlier lm [14].
Film was also a crucial technology for the new eld of motion pictures. Thomas Edison, the
archetypical technology entrepreneur of the era, led the rst of his many patents in the eld in 1888.
Movie cameras and projectors required complex mechanical systems to move the lm while it was
exposed and projected. They also needed special camera and projection lenses. The real growth of the
industry started after the turn of the century and led to new companies such as Bell and Howell,
founded in 1907 by two projectionists.
By the turn of the century, optics had become a big business, especially in Rochester. In 1903,
Bausch and Lomb reported making 20 million eyeglasses a year. Photography also was growing, with
the company reporting total sales of 500,000 photographic lenses and 550,000 camera shutters since
entering the business in the 1880s. Smaller optics companies were proliferating.
Precision optics and optical instruments remained a smaller eld, dominated by German companies
such as Zeiss and Schott. That would become an important factor in the formation of The Optical
Society, as military agencies sought to develop American sources of military optics after the start of
World War I cut off access to high-quality German glass and optics.
References
1.
2.
3.
4.
A. Einstein and L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (Simon & Schuster, 1961).
R. Wimmer, Essays in Astronomy (D. Appleton, Company, 1900). Public domain.
A. B. Buckley, Through Magic Glasses, and Other Lectures (Appleton, New York, 1890).
http://www.aip.org/history/cosmology/tools/tools-refractors.htm
15
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
16
http://www.birrcastle.com/things-to-do-in-offaly/the-great-telescope/info_12.html
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/timeline/people/abbe.html
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/museum/museum1800.html
D. Atchison and W. N. Charman, Thomas Youngs contribution to visual optics. The Bakerian lecture
on the mechanism of the eye, J. Vis. 10(12):16, 116 (2010).
T. Young, On the mechanism of the eye, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. 91(Part I), 2388 plus plates
(1801).
E. Hill, Eyeglasses and spectacles, history of, in C. A. Wood, The American Encyclopedia and
Dictionary of Ophthalmology (Cleveland Press, 2015), Vol. 7, pp. 48944952.
H. Helmholtz, Handbook of Physiological Optics (Dover, 1962, reprint of translation by J. P. S.
Southall).
R. Kingslake, A history of the Rochester, New York, camera and lens companies, in R. Kingslake, The
Rochester Camera and Lens Companies (Photographic Historical Society, Rochester, New York, 1974).
http://www.nwmangum.com/Kodak/Rochester.html
Wikipedia cites an 1883 date for the rst Bausch & Lomb photographic lens, Wikipedia reference at
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlomb.htm, but the most recent listing for that source, http://
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlomb.htm, at archive.org is 3 October, 2013.
http://www.nwmangum.com/Kodak/Rochester.html
PRE-1940

Patricia Daukantas
uring the rst quarter century of The Optical Society (OSA), spectroscopy led to major
insights into atomic and molecular physics and paved the way for important practical
applications. Optical spectroscopy existed for decades before the formation of OSA, but
it was empirical and descriptive in its nature. Spectroscopists had carefully measured the
wavelengths of spectral lines associated with various elements, but the subatomic mechanisms
that created these lines were not yet fully understood.
Twenty-four years later, as the world lurched toward the second all-encompassing war of
the twentieth century, the spectroscopic ngerprints of atoms and molecules had provided vital
evidence for the emerging quantum theory. Experimentalists rened their techniques and
discovered previously unknown phenomena.
Spectroscopy and Quantum Mechanics

A few years before OSA was formed, Niels Bohr had proposed his model of the hydrogen atom,
which explained the empirical Rydberg formula for the spectral lines of atomic hydrogen, at least
to a rst approximation. Theodore Lyman completed his investigations of the ultraviolet
emission lines of hydrogen, beginning at 1216 in 1914.
Little happened in spectroscopy during World War I, but the eld came raging back shortly
after the armistice. In 1919, Arnold Sommerfeld, doctoral adviser to multiple Nobel Laureates,
published Atombau und Spektralinien (Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines). William F.
Meggers, who would become the 19491950 OSA president, opined that spectroscopists were
amazed that our meager knowledge of atomic structure and the origin of spectra could be
expanded into such a big book [1].
The same year, Sommerfeld and another German physicist, Walther Kossel, formulated
the displacement law now named after them [1]. The law states that the singly ionized spectrum
of an element resembles the neutral spectrum of the element preceding it in the periodic table.
Likewise, the doubly ionized spectrum of an element resembles the singly ionized spark
spectrum of the element preceding it, or the neutral spectrum of the element with atomic
number two less than the designated element. The neutral spectrum was usually obtained by
running an arc of current through a vapor; ionized spectra came from the light of an electric
spark in a gas or vapor.
In 1922, the English physicist Alfred Fowler and the German team of Friedrich Paschen and
Richard Goetze published tables of observational data on spectral singlets, doublets, and triplets
without interpreting them according to the edgling quantum theory. Later the same year,
Miguel A. Cataln of Spain published his nding that the arc spectra of complex atoms have lines
that occur in groups with certain numerical regularities [1]. He called these groups multiplets,
and their discovery sparked a productive era of description and interpretation of the optical
spectra of most complex atoms, except those of the rare-earth elements.
The following year, Sommerfeld [1] posited the inner-quantum number, now known as
the azimuthal quantum number, represented by the script letter l and the familiar subshells
s, p, d, and f. In OSAs journal, Sommerfeld also proposed a model for the neutral helium atom,
which had perplexed scientists since Bohr explained the hydrogen atom [2].
17
Then in 1925, Americans Henry Norris Russell and Frederick A. Saunders examined the spectrum
of calcium and discovered the type of spin-orbit coupling now known as LS coupling [3]. This
breakthrough led to, in short order, an outburst of important theories of atomic structure and atomic
spectra. Meggers [1] listed the astonishing output of a single year, 1925:
Wolfgang Paulis rule for equivalent electrons and his exclusion principle;
Friedrich Hunds correlation of spectral terms with electron congurations and his correlation of
multiplet components to series limits; and
the determination by George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit of the contribution of electron spin
to the complexity of spectra, and their postulation of the half-integral quantum numbers of
fermions.
Nearly simultaneously in 1925, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrdinger formulated their
matrix and wave mechanics formalisms, and quantum theory blossomed. Two years later, Heisenberg
came up with his uncertainty principle, which partially explains spectral line broadening (but is
certainly not the only cause of it).
The Astronomical Connection

Some of the early spectroscopists, including Lyman, Russell, and Fowler, either worked as astrophysicists or had some background in the subject. The two specialties were synergistic: the discoveries
of lines in the spectra of sunlight and starlight had motivated the birth of spectroscopy in the rst place,
and, as more atoms yielded their secrets in earthbound laboratories, astronomers learned about the
chemical composition of the universe.
For instance, as a young man Frederick Sumner Brackett observed infrared radiation from the Sun
at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California; in 1922, he discovered the series of infrared spectral
lines, which bear his name, by studying the light
from a hydrogen discharge tube [4]. In 1924, Ira S.
Bowen (see Fig. 1) and OSA Honorary Member
Robert A. Millikan modied their vacuum spectrograph to make it easier to record the extreme
ultraviolet spectra of atoms heated by sparks [5].
Their work extended the range of spectroscopy into
many light neutral atoms and multiply ionized
heavier atoms. In turn, the lab work enabled Bowen
to solve, in 1928, the mystery of the postulated
element nebulium.
Nineteenth-century astronomers had observed
bright green emission lines in the object known as
NGC 6543, popularly called the Cats Eye Nebula.
Since the lines matched those of no known element
on Earth, they were attributed to a new substance
named after the nebula. With his knowledge of both
astronomy and spectroscopy, Bowen demonstrated
that the emitting element was not nebulium at all,
but doubly ionized oxygen giving off forbidden lines
spectral lines not normally permitted by the selection rules of quantum mechanics, but spontaneously occurring in the hard vacuum of a tenuous
astrophysical gas cloud [6].
A decade later, astronomerspectroscopists
Fig. 1. Ira S. Bowen. (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre
Walter
Grotrian and Bengt Edln identied the
Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Collection.)
18
true nature of coronium, another would-be

element found in the solar corona 70 years earlier.
Coronium turned out to be highly ionized iron,
nickel, and calcium [7]. Every place astrophysicists
have since looked, the rest of the universe consists
of the same chemical elements that are found
on Earth.
Advances in Molecular
Spectroscopy
While some physicists occupied themselves with
subatomic structures, other physicists and chemists
investigated new spectroscopic phenomena in molecules. The nineteenth-century observations of uorescence by G. G. Stokes led to the American R. W.
Woods discovery of resonance radiation of vapors
in 1918.
Wood (see Fig. 2), for whom an OSA award is
named, began his career with detailed investigations
of the spectra of iodine, mercury, and other elements
in gaseous form. As a biographer wrote, Wood
discovered resonance radiation and studied its
many puzzling features with great thoroughness
and amazing experimental ingenuity [8].
By far the biggest boost to molecular spectroscopy during this time period was C. V. Ramans
discovery of the inelastic scattering of lightthe
effect that came to bear his name. During his
European trip in 1921, Raman (see Fig. 3), a native
of India, spied the wonderful blue opalescence of
the Mediterranean Sea and, as a result, was inspired
to study the scattering of light through liquids [9]. In
1928, he and a colleague, K. S. Krishnan, discovered
the inelastic scattering of photons now known as the
Raman effect.
Lacking lasers, Raman and Krishnan had to use
sunlight passed through a narrow-band photographic lter as a monochromatic light source.
Early scientists who studied Raman scattering used
mercury arc lamps or gas-discharge lamps as their
sources. Nevertheless, in the 1930s scientists used
Raman spectroscopy to develop the rst catalog of
molecular vibrational frequencies. The technique,
however, would not reach its full owering until the
development of the laser in the 1960s.
Optical spectroscopy also played an important
role in the understanding of nuclear structure. Although A. A. Michelson had observed hyperne
structure as far back as 1881, it lacked an interpretation until 1924, when Pauli proposed that it
Fig. 2. R. W. Wood. (Courtesy of The Observatories

of the Carnegie Institution for Science Collection at the
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.)
Fig. 3. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman.

(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, courtesy AIP
Emilio Segre Visual Archives.)
19
resulted from a small nuclear magnetic

moment. In a 1927 article on the hyperne
structures of the spectral lines of lanthanum, Meggers and Keivan Burns pointed
out the association between wide hyperne
splitting and spectral terms that arise when
a single s-type electron manages to penetrate the atoms core [10]. These penetrating electrons, so to speak, spy upon
atomic nuclei and reveal in the hyperne
structure of spectral lines certain properties of the nuclei, Meggers wrote in 1946
[1]. These properties are mechanical,
magnetic, and quadrupole moments.
Fig. 4.
William F. Meggers with his laboratory equipment.

(Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers
Collection.)
Spectral Analysis and

Instrumentation
In parallel with the investigations into

atomic and molecular structure, scientists
of the 1920s and 1930s still had much to
learn about the spectra of the various elements. They also made improvements to
spectroscopic instruments and measurement techniques.
Before 1922, according to Meggers
(see Fig. 4), scientists had only three ways
to make quantitative spectrochemical
analyses: the length-of-line method, the
residual spectrum method, and the intensity-comparison with standards method
[1]. During the following two decades, at
least three dozen new techniques were
published in the literature, although some
were simply modications of other procedures. Meggers and two of his colleagues
at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards,
C. C. Kiess and F. J. Stimson, published a
1922 monograph to bridge the gap between semiquantitative and quantitative
spectroscopic analysis [11]. In 1926,
Bowen published a detailed how-to article
on vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy [12],
Fig. 5. George R. Harrison working with laboratory
which David MacAdam later deemed one
equipment. (Photograph by A. Bortzells Tryckeri, AIP Emilio
of the milestone articles in the history of
Segre Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel
the Journal of The Optical Society of
Laureates.)
America (JOSA) [13].
In a major advance for pre-laser applied spectroscopy, Henrik Lundegrdh in 1929 developed a
new ame-emission spectroscopy technique, which used a pneumatic nebulizer to spray a vaporized
sample into an air-acetylene ame. This method made it easier for scientists to process many samples in
a single day [14].
20
Since each chemical element can emit as many different spectra as it has electrons, the 92
naturally occurring elements can produce a total of 4278 spectra, according to Meggers [1]. Yet by
1939, according to a report by Allen G. Shenstone, only 400 or so had been analyzed in any great
detail [15]. Scientists still kept plugging away at their analyses. George R. Harrison (see Fig. 5), OSA
president in 1945 and 1946, once said that Meggers determined the origins in atoms and ions of
more spectrum lines than any other person, though Harrison himself may have been a close second
in that race [16].
With the data they did have, though, scientists vigorously advanced the eld of spectrochemical
analysis of mixed or complex substances. Meggers credited Harrison with spurring progress in this area
by organizing 10 annual conferences on spectroscopy and applications, beginning in 1933. Researchers
and technicians improved both prism spectrographs, which were favored in Europe, and grating
spectrographs, by far the choice of Americans.
In 1938, Harrison invented a high-speed automatic comparator to record the intensities and
wavelengths of spectral lines, and the following year he published the MIT Wavelength Tables, which
listed the precise wavelengths of more than 100,000 individual spectral lines. Thanks to the economic
circumstances of the era, Harrison procured funds from the U.S. Works Progress Administration to hire
143 workers to assist with the measurement of all those spectral lines. (A second edition, revised 30
years after its initial publication, is still in print.)
Toward the Future

During the rst quarter-century of OSAs existence, spectroscopy helped scientists consolidate the
understanding of the structure of atoms and molecules, led to a greater understanding of the universe,
and paved the way for many new practical applications.
As 1940 dawned, the laserand the many new spectroscopy techniques it would spawnwas still
two decades in the future. From a kindling pile of quantum-related hypotheses, however, scientists on
three continents had assembled a coherent quantum theory largely resting on the evidence from optical
spectroscopy, and this quantum knowledge would in turn spawn the optical revolution of the last 60
years.
References
1. W. F. Meggers, Spectroscopy, past, present, and future, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 36, 431443 (1946).
2. A. Sommerfeld, The model of the neutral helium atom, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 7, 509515 (1923).
3. H. N. Russell and F. A. Saunders, New regularities in the spectra of the alkaline earths, Astrophys.
J. 61, 3869 (1925).
4. F. S. Brackett, Visible and infra-red radiation of hydrogen, Astrophys. J. 56, 154161 (1922).
5. L. A. Du Bridge and P. A. Epstein, Robert A. Millikan, in Biographical Memoirs (National Academy
of Sciences, 1959), p. 260.
6. H. W. Babcock, Ira S. Bowen, in Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences, 1982),
Vol. 53, p. 92.
7. P. Swings, Edlns identication of the coronal lines with forbidden lines of Fe X, XI, XIII, XIV, XV;
Ni XII, XIII, XV, XVI; Ca XII, XIII, XV, A X, XIV, Astrophys. J. 98, 116128 (1943).
8. G. H. Dieke, Robert Williams Wood, in Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences,
1993), Vol. 62, p. 445.
9. C. V. Raman, The molecular scattering of light, Nobel lecture, 11 December 1930, online at www.
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1930/raman-lecture.pdf.
10. W. F. Meggers and K. Burns, Hyperne structures of lanthanum lines, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 14, 449454
(1927).
11. W. F. Meggers, C. C. Kiess, and F. J. Stimson, Practical spectrographic analysis, Scientic Paper 444,
Scientic Papers of the Bureau of Standards 18, 235255 (1922).
21
12. I. S. Bowen, Vacuum spectroscopy, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 13, 8993 (1926).
13. J. N. Howard, Milestone JOSA articles from 19171973, Opt. Photon. News 18(11), 20 (November
2007).
14. A. W. D. Larkum, Contributions of Henrik Lundegrdh, Photosynth. Research 76, 105110 (2003).
15. W. Jevons and A. G. Shenstone, Spectroscopy: I. atomic spectra, Rep. Prog. Phys. 5, 210226 (1938).
16. J. N. Howard, Honorary Members of the 1950s, Opt. Photon. News 19(5), 24 (May 2008).
17. G. R. Harrison and F. M. Phelps, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wavelength Tables (MIT
Press, 1969).
22
PRE-1940
Government and Industrial Research

Laboratories
Carlos Stroud
common impression is that each of the many types of lasers was invented in an
industrial research laboratory. While one can dispute the accuracy of that statement in a
few cases, there is no argument that industrial and governmental research laboratories
were the locations of much of the development of optics in the twentieth century.
The concept of an industrial research laboratory emerged just before the beginning of the
twentieth century. The rst industrial optics research laboratory was Carl-Zeiss Stiftung,
founded in 1889, in Jena, Germany, by Ernst Abbe. It grew out of earlier collaboration by
Abbe, Otto Schott, and Carl Zeiss, and quickly became the source of optical glass and precision
optical instruments for most of the world [1]. This German success did not go unnoticed and
helped to stimulate the founding of other laboratories. The contributions of industrial and
governmental laboratories in the twentieth century were truly incredible, and this essay briey
reviews how these various laboratories came to be; but it will leave, for the most part, their
enormous range of inventions and discoveries to be described in the later essays in this volume.
Several factors led to the rise of industrial and government research laboratories at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The harnessing of steam power, and then electricity, led to
mass-consumer-product industries that had sufcient resources to support basic research
laboratories. In 1903 Bausch & Lomb sold 20 million spectacle lenses and 500,000 photographic
lenses per year; Eastman Kodak sold 150,000 Brownie cameras in 1900, the rst year it was sold;
and by 1914 General Electric sold 88.5 million lamps in the United States alone [2]. The general
public saw the night lit up by electric lights; radio, telephone, and motion pictures changed the
way people lived and perceived the future. Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola
Tesla captured the popular imagination as scientic geniuses who would develop new technologies that would revolutionize industry. Everything was aligned to enable and encourage large
investments in basic research. Small laboratories for quality and process control existed before,
but not industrial and governmental research laboratories whose task was to develop whole new
technologies and products that had never existed.
Following the Civil War, industry grew rapidly in the United States. The new companies
were receptive to change and optimistic about future technologies, so much of the early
development of industrial laboratories occurred in the United States. In 1900 General Electric
(GE) established the rst industrial basic research laboratory in Schenectady, New York, an
outgrowth of Edisons earlier laboratories.
General Electric characterizes the nature of this laboratory:
The lab was the rst industrial research lab of its kind. Prior to the formation of the GE
Research Lab the only industrial research labs were German pharmaceutical labs. In the
German labs like Bayer scientists and researchers worked independently and competed with
one another. At General Electric in Schenectady, New York engineers and scientists were
encouraged to share information and assist with problem solving. They were given great
nancial support to buy materials. The best machinists and craftsmen were employed to
help build prototypes. From the tungsten light bulb to the computerized hybrid car it is no
wonder that the Schenectady lab produced a great proportion of our world's technology [3].
23
While the General Electric laboratory was not focused on conventional optics, it did work on
illumination and the development of x-ray sources. William Coolidges x-ray tube designs were
instrumental in leading to the development of radiology, and his discovery of a method to make
tungsten ductile provided a long-life lament for incandescent light bulbs. Soon GE was selling
them by the millions, and Irving Langmuirs studies of monatomic lms on laments led to GEs rst
Nobel Prize. Most important, the GE Research Lab set the standard that other industrial labs used
as a model.
In 1918 the Westinghouse Research Laboratory was established with goals and organization much
like those of the earlier General Electric laboratory. In particular, this research laboratory was separate
from any manufacturing facility. Again, the early work in this laboratory was not devoted to optics,
although it was soon working in optical spectroscopy, a pursuit that it maintained for most of the
century. One notable contribution to optics from this Pittsburgh laboratory was that it provided the
rst job for Brian OBrien, who was the rst permanent director of the University of Rochesters
Institute of Optics. OBrien, working with Joseph Slepian, developed the rst lightening arrestors,
which are commonly used today [4].
In 1915 the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory was founded, and before World War I (WWI)
broke out, laboratories were established at Dupont, Standard Oil (Indiana), U.S. Rubber, and Corning
Glass. Bausch & Lomb did not have a formal research laboratory at that time but were soon central to
the United States efforts in optical research and development. After WWI Major Fred E. Wright wrote
the following in a Journal of the Optical Society of America article [5]:
Before this country entered the war, it was realized that the making of optical glass might
prove to be a serious problem. Prior to 1914, practically all of the optical glass used in the
United States had been imported from abroad; manufacturers followed the line of least
resistance and preferred to procure certain commodities, such as optical glass, chemical dyes,
and other materials difcult to produce, direct from Europe, rather than to undertake their
manufacture here. The war stopped this source of supply abruptly, and in 1915 experiments
on the making optical glass were underway at ve different plants: The Bausch & Lomb
Optical Co. at Rochester, N.Y.; the Bureau of Standards at Pittsburgh, Pa.; the Keuffel &
Esser Company at Hoboken, N.J.; the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company at Charloi, Pa.; the
Spencer Lens Company at Hamburg, Buffalo, N.Y. By April, 1917, the situation had become
acute; some optical glass of fair quality had been produced, but nowhere had its manufacture
in adequate quantities been placed on an assured basis. The glass-making processes were not
adequately known. Without optical glass, re-control instruments could not be produced;
optical glass is a thing of high precision, and its manufacture, accurate control is required
over all the factory processes. In this emergency the Government appealed to the Geophysical
Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington for assistance. This laboratory had been
engaged for many years in the study of solutions, such as optical glass, at high temperatures, and
had a corps of scientists trained along the lines essential to the successful production of optical
glass; it was the only group in the country with a personnel adequate and competent to
undertake a manufacturing problem of this character and magnitude. A group of their scientists,
with writer [Major Wright] in charge, was accordingly placed in April 1917, at the Bausch &
Lomb Optical Company, and took over virtual direction of the plant.
The effort succeeded, and the United States became a serious player in optics and optical
instrumentation, no longer depending on European supplies and technology.
The military importance of precision optics in WWI was enormously enhanced by two technological developments: (1) machining of artillery barrels was much more precise than ever before so that
shells could be directed much more accuratelyif you knew with enough accuracy where your target
was located; and (2) military aircraft, which required bomb sights and aerial cameras for the airplanes
and ground-based binoculars and telescopes for the anti-aircraft artillery. Another development that
one does not usually associate with optics was the invention of camouage to hide ships, airplanes, and
land-based targets from the improved optics. Abstract artists were brought in to design the patterns,
24
and the company cafeteria building at Eastman

Kodak was turned over to the military to develop
camouage, while other parts of the company developed aerial cameras.
These people and industries involved in American optics in WWI played a further enormous role
in the development of optics. A group of them
including representatives from Eastman Kodak and
Bausch & Lomb met in the physics library at the
University of Rochester in November 1915 to found
the Rochester Optical Society, with an explicit intention of also founding a national optical society,
which they did when they led the founding of The
Optical Society at a meeting the following February
in Washington. Perley G. Nutting (Fig. 1) of the
Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory was the rst
society president, and the second president was the
same Frederick E. Wright who led the glass effort at
Bausch & Lomb. Adolph Lomb was the rst treasurer of the society, and personally wrote checks to
cover the budget decits in the initial years. This
connection between the early industrial research
Fig. 1. Perley G. Nutting unceasingly campaigned
laboratories and the founding of professional
for the establishment of a United States national optical
societies and scientic journals was no coincidence.
society. He started the campaign while working as one
C. E. K. Mees, the founding head of the Eastman
of the rst employees of the National Bureau of
Kodak Research Laboratories, wrote in his history
Standards and later as one of the rst employees of the
of the labs [6] that he and George Eastman disEastman Kodak Research Laboratories. He led the
successful effort to found The Optical Society and
cussed the nature of the industrial research laboraserved as its rst President. Courtesy of The Optical
tory that they planned to establish, and decided that
Society (OSA).
if they wanted to have the best scientists on their
staff they would have to encourage them to publish
and to interact with other scientists. Good scientists need this interaction to be happy and productive.
Furthermore, there needed to be professional societies and journals to support their efforts. The whole
development of the optical research establishment owes a debt to this industrial initiative. Their
contribution goes further. Mees and Eastman also decided that there needed to be an academic
department to train optical engineers and scientists and to carry out basic optics research. They, along
with Edward Bausch, approached the President of the University of Rochester about founding such a
department. In 1929 the Institute of Optics was founded with a promise of an initial $20,000 grant for
equipment and continuing support of $20,000 per year for ve years, renewable for ve more. Mees
himself (Fig. 2) taught courses in photographic theory for many years in the Institute [7].
In 1925, Western Electric Research Laboratories and part of the engineering department of the
American Telephone & Telegraph Company joined to form Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., as a
separate entity. It was tasked to plan, design, and support the equipment that Western Electric built for
Bell System operating companies. A few workers were assigned to basic research, and the results were
rather spectacular, as essays later in this volume attest, and include 14 Nobel Laureates for work carried
out in part or full at Bell Labs.
Another monopoly that led to the founding of an important industrial research laboratory was for
radio communications. During WWI the Western Allies cut the German transatlantic telegraph cables
and the Central Powers maintained contact with neutral countries in the Americas via long-distance
radio communications. In 1917 the government of the United States took charge of the patents owned
by the major companies involved in radio manufacture to devote radio technology to military needs.
After the war, the War and Navy departments sought to maintain a federal monopoly of all uses of
25
radio technology. Congress did not agree to continue this monopoly after the war, but the Army and
the Navy negotiated with GE that if they bought
assets of the conscated American Marconi Company and founded a publicly held company in which
they managed to retain controlling interest, that
company, the Radio Corporation of America
(RCA), would be granted a monopoly on radio
communication. Westinghouse and AT&T joined
in the forming of the company. So, by 1920 AT&T
had a monopoly on long-distance telephone systems, and GE and Westinghouse, through RCA, had
a monopoly on long-distance radio communication.
By the mid-1920s short waves had replaced radio
waves for long distance communication, the
federal government broke up the monopoly controlled by GE and Westinghouse, and RCA became
a separate and successful company. RCA made
major optics contributions in photomultipliers,
LEDs, CMOS devices, and liquid crystals, as well
as in the development of sound recording, radio,
and television [8].
Fig. 2 C. E. Kenneth Mees. George Eastman
If WWI greatly changed industrial research,
wanted C. E. Kenneth Mees so much to be the founding
and
industrial optics research in particular, WWII
head of the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory that
completely
redened it and made it and governmenhe bought the English company for which Mees was a
tal
research
a central component in the American
part owner, Wratten and Wainright, and moved Mees
and the company to Rochester, where he led the
economy. United States involvement in this war was
laboratories until his retirement after World War II
more protracted than in WWI, and science and
(WWII). (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives.)
technology, particularly in the areas of radar and
atomic bombs, were central to the nations effort.
This short essay cannot cover all of the important developments lab by lab even within optics. Happily,
many of the contributions of these labs are detailed in the chapters on individual technologies later in
this volume. Therefore this essay will be limited to general trends and national initiatives. While the
concept of industrial research laboratories grew out of nineteenth-century Germany, most of the major
developments in the rst half of the twentieth century were in the United States. After recovery from the
devastation of WWII, Europe joined in with its own important industrial research laboratories. World
War II not only was the genitor of many new industrial research laboratories, but it also led to a
proliferation of governmental research labs. Their origins will be reviewed before the evolution of all of
these labs during the second half of the century is discussed.
The Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, was founded by Charles II in 1675. The United
States got into the governmental laboratory business somewhat later with the establishment of the Depot
of Charts and Instruments, the predecessor of the U.S. Naval Observatory, in 1830. But, it was in 1900
that Congress passed an act establishing the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), the direct predecessor
of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose scientists have received four recent
Nobel Prizes in optics. These were among 13 Nobel Prizes awarded employees of governmental research
laboratories in the United States. The climate that led to the forming of this laboratory is mentioned at the
beginning of this essay and is nicely stated in the ofcial history of NIST [9]:
The idea of a national bureau of standards was presented at an auspicious hour. America in the
year 1900 thought well of itself. The hard times of 189395 were all but forgotten in the aura
of prosperity and sense of achievement that energized the Nation. Industry and invention
boomed and business ourished as never before. The prophets at the turn of the century
unanimously agreed on the good years to come.
26
At the recommendation of the Secretary of the Treasury, Congress passed a bill, which the
president signed, to form NBS, which was to aid manufacturing, commerce, the matters of scientic
apparatus, the scientic work of the Government, of schools, colleges, and universities. It was not just
in the United States that the need for such a government laboratory was felt; in England the National
Physical Laboratory was founded in the very same year for these same purposes.
The staff of NBS in 1904 included in the Section on Light and Optical Instruments: Samuel W.
Stratton, Perley G. Nutting, and Frederick J. Bates. This same Perley G. Nutting was already working to
found a national optical society before he was lured away to the newly formed Eastman Kodak
Research Laboratory, where he led the effort to found the local Rochester society, and then OSA, of
which he was the rst president.
We return our narrative to the onset of WWII when industrial and governmental optics research
had a true phase transition in its development. As war broke out in Europe in 1939 a group of leading
scientists and academic administrators including Vannevar Bush, President of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington; James B. Conant, President of Harvard University; Frank B. Jewett, President of the
National Academy of Sciences and President of Bell Laboratories; Karl Compton, President of MIT;
and Richard C. Tolman, Dean of the Graduate School at California Institute of Technology, were
concerned with the lack of technological preparedness of the U.S. for its likely entry in the war. They
suggested a plan for the establishment of the National Defense Research Committee (NRDC), which
Vannevar Bush described in four paragraphs that he submitted to President Roosevelt. At the end of ten
minutes he had an approval from the President, and an order creating NDRC was issued on 27 June
1940. Some 30 years later in his biographical memoirs Bush describes the reasons for this initiative [10]:
There were those who protested that the action of setting up NDRC was an end run, a grab by
which a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside established channels, got
hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons. That, in fact, is
exactly what it was. Moreover, it was the only way in which a broad program could be
launched rapidly and on an adequate scale. To operate through established channels would
have involved delaysand the hazard that independence might have been lost, that independence which was the central feature of the organizations success.
Bush was appointed chairman, and the organization was established and expanded in 1942 to
become the Ofce of Scientic Research and Development (OSRD), with Bush as director (Fig. 3). The
OSRD had three principal subdivisions at that time: the NDRC, with Conant as chairman; the
Committee on Medical Research (CMR), with A. Newton Richards as chairman; and the advisory
Council, with Bush as chairman. The latter included the chairmen of the National Advisory Committee
on Aeronautics (NACA), NDRC, and CMR, as well as representatives from the Army and Navy as a
coordinating group. In addition, Bush was chairman of the Joint New Weapons Committee of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and, when the Manhattan District was created, chairman of its Military Policy
Committee, which served as its board of directors [11].
Perhaps one might be tempted to say that the power grab was by Bush himself, but he had the
condence of the President and Congress so that he was able to coordinate and to smooth the inevitable
friction between these varied groups remarkably well. Weisner summarizes quite nicely the organization that Bush set up:
The organization was a remarkable invention, but the most signicant innovation was the plan
by which, instead of building large government laboratories, contracts were made with
universities and industrial laboratories for research appropriate to their capabilities. OSRD
responded to requests from military agencies for work on specic problems, but it maintained
its independence and in many cases pursued research objectives about which military leaders
were skeptical. Military tradition was that a way had to be fought with weapons that existed
at its beginning. Bush believed that World War II could be won only through advances in
technology, and he proved to be correct. In some instances, the armed forces were enthusiastically cooperative. In others, resistance to innovation had to be overcome. Bush, himself, went
to Europe to make sure that the proximity fuse was introduced to the battleeld and used
effectively.
27
Fig. 3
Vannevar Bush watches as President Truman presents James Conant with the Medal of Merit and Bronze
Oak Leaf Cluster in May, 1948. The nation was greatly appreciative of the leadership of Bush and Conant and other
scientists during the war, allowing Bush and Conant to build a structure to continue government support of research
after the war through governmental laboratories and research grants for university basic research.
The major exception to the policy of avoiding the building of government laboratories was in
the development of the atomic bomb. After preliminary studies by NDRC and OSRD, it
became clear that a colossal program would be needed, and Bush recommended to Secretary
Stimson that the Army take over the responsibility. The result was the formation of Manhattan
Engineering District by the Corps of Engineers. Bush with Conant as his deputy, maintained an
active scrutiny of the enterprise.
This was the foundation of science and engineering administration in the U.S. as it exists up until
now. All of the developments in optics in the second half of the century grew up in this environment.
Optics during the war was overseen by Division 16, Optics and Camouage of the NDRC. It was led by
George Harrison. Paul Kelley describes elsewhere in this volume the optical developments during this
period. Well before the war was over, Bush started to plan how the momentum of research could be
sustained with new peacetime goals. President Roosevelt asked him to make recommendations on
government policies for combating disease, supporting research, developing scientic talent, and
diffusing scientic information. Four committees were set up to generate recommendations. On the
basis of these recommendations Bush submitted a report titled ScienceThe Endless Frontier, which
laid out the proposals for organizing post-war science and technology. The argument for the
government to continue supporting research after the war was summed up in the report: To create
more jobs we must make new and better and cheaper products. We want plenty of new, vigorous
enterprises. But new products and processes are not born full-grown. They are founded on new
principles and new conceptions which in turn result from basic scientic research. Basic scientic
research is scientic capital.
28
The National Science Foundation was proposed, and a bill was introduced in Congress by
Senator Warren Magnuson from Washington. After
much argument in Congress and a veto by President
Truman, a modied version was signed by President
Truman in 1947. Vannevar Bush asked that
Truman not name him to the board of the new
foundation, suggesting that people were tired of his
running things. Even before the NSF was launched,
the Ofce of Naval Research was established in
1946 with the stated mission of planning, fostering, and encouraging scientic research in recognition of its paramount importance as related to the
maintenance of future naval power and the preservation of national security. The Air Force Ofce
Scientic Research would be formed in 1951 and
the Army Research Ofce in 1957, and the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
was signed into existence by President Eisenhower
in 1958. Figure 4 shows the Laser Guide Star
Adaptive Optics project, one of the technologies
that came from the funding provided by those
agencies. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grew out of the old NACA
during the administration of President Eisenhower.
At present the Navy operates one laboratory and
seventeen Warfare Centers. The Army operates
Fig. 4 The Air Force Starre Optical Range for
lidar and laser guide star experiments is tuned to the
eleven labs, and the Air Force operates one laborasodium D2a line and used to excite sodium atoms
tory and ten Technical Directorates.
in the upper atmosphere. This provides what is
The old Army-controlled Manhattan Project
essentially a point source of light in the mesosphere to
during the course of the war developed a number
use for adaptive optics to remove blurring of ground
of secret sites including Los Alamos, Hanford, and
based imaging due to atmospheric turbulence.
Oak Ridge. There was also the reactor research lab
at the University of Chicago that spawned Argonne
National Laboratory. After the war the Atomic Energy Commission took over the wartime laboratories, extending their lives indenitely, and funding was obtained to establish a number of new
laboratories for classied as well as basic research. Each of the new laboratories was generally centered
around some particle accelerators or nuclear reactors. At present, the organization in charge is the
Department of Energy (DOE), and it administers 19 different national laboratories and provides more
than 40% of the total national funding for physics, chemistry, and materials science. While the DOE
directs most of its attention to nuclear, particle, and plasma physics, it supports major efforts in optics
as well, especially through its high-energy laser fusion programs and its x-ray light sources.
Another important source of funding for optics research is the independent research and
development funds that are provided by indirect cost charges to military contracts, allowing military
contractors to carry out internal research programs and keep their scientists and engineers busy
between contracts developing new technology. This supports long-term research efforts at many
industrial laboratories.
This enormous research and development system that grew out of WWII is not without its
detractors; many point to the address of Dwight David Eisenhower just three days before he left ofce.
The President, who signed into existence many of the agencies that support this system warned, In the
councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted inuence, whether
sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist. As you look over the essays in this volume that review the
29
progress in optical science and technology, particularly over the past half century in which optics has
become an indispensable enabler in essentially every industry, it is hard to fault the model, given its
evident success. But even today, some 50 years after this speech, many would argue that we need to keep
our guard up to see that this enormously benecial system of research and development is not
corrupted.
References
1. Carl-Zeiss-StiftungCompany prole, information, business description, history, background
information on Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung. http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/79/Carl-ZeissStiftung.html.
2. R. Kane and H. Sell, Revolution in Lamps: A Chronicle of 50 Years of Progress, 2nd ed. (Fairmont Press,
2001), p. 37, table 21.
3. General Electric Research Lab, http://www.edisontechcenter.org/GEresearchLab.html.
4. C. R. Stroud, Jr., Brian O'Brien, 18981992, A Biographical Memoir (National Academy of Sciences,
2010).
5. F. E. Wright, War-time development of the optical industry, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 2, 1 (1919).
6. C. E. K. Mees, The Kodak Research Laboratories, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. 8 135, 133147 (1948).
7. C. Stroud, Jewel in the Crown (Meliora Press, 2004), p. 18.
8. R. Sobel, RCA (Stein and Day, 1986).
9. http://www.nist.gov/nvl/upload/MP275_06_Chapter_I-__AT_THE_TURN_OF_THE_CENTURY.
pdf.
10. V. Bush, Pieces of the Action (William Morrow, 1970), p. 32.
11. J. B. Wiesner, Vannevar Bush 18901974, Biographical Memoir (National Academy of Sciences, 1979).
30
PRE-1940

Todd Gustavson
Introduction
The photographic process, announced in 1839 by the Frenchman Louis Jacques Mand
Daguerre, captured and xed the images that were viewed through a camera obscura. This
was accomplished through a combination of mechanics (the camera), optics (to improve the
image), and chemistry (to sensitize and process the image). Over the next forty years, improvements made to all aspects of the processcameras, shutters, lenses, and chemistryled to
cheaper and simpler image making, generating a growing interest for the nonprofessional
photographer.
The technicalities of early photography required the photographer to sensitize media shortly
before exposure and then process the image immediately afterward. Although this system was
ne for the professional, it was generally too cumbersome and time-consuming for most
amateurs. On 13 April 1880, George Eastman of Rochester, New York, patented a machine
for coating gelatin dry plates. The following January, with the nancial backing of Rochester
businessman Henry Strong, he formed the Eastman Dry Plate Company, one of the rst
commercial producers of light-sensitive photographic emulsions. With reliable plates now
available, companies worldwide began manufacturing cameras designed specically to use them.
Eastmans business expanded ve years later with the introduction of his American Film, a
paper-supported stripping lm intended for the professional market. It was not well received by
the professionals, who considered it to be rather difcult to process. Undeterred, Eastman instead
used it in a new small box camera he named the Kodak. Introduced in 1888, the Kodak was an
easy-to-use detective camera, a box-style, point-and-shoot camera meant for the novice
photographer. Eastmans camera required no adjustments, which was atypical of the time, but
the real innovation was after exposing the lm: the camera was shipped back to the company for
processing and reloading, marking the beginning of the professional photo-nishing industry.
This novel feature was marketed with the advertising slogan You press the button, we do the
rest, which established the companys business model: the promotion of cameras as the means
to selling highly protable lm and processing. Twelve years later, the Brownie camera was
added to the camera line; its $1.00 selling price made photography available to just about
everyone.
Brownie
Introduced by Eastman Kodak Company in 1900, the Brownie camera was an immediate public
sensation due to its simple-to-use design and inexpensive price. (See Fig. 1.) Now nearly anybody,
regardless of age, gender, or race, could afford to be a photographer without the specialized
knowledge or cost once associated with the capture and processing of images. An important
aspect of the Brownie cameras rapid ascendancy in popular culture as a must-have possession
was Eastman Kodak Companys innovative marketing via print advertising. The company took
the unusual step of advertising the Brownie in popular magazines instead of specialty photography or trade magazines with limited readership. George Eastman derived the cameras name
31
Fig. 1.
Brownie camera. Eastman Kodak

Company, Rochester, New York, ca. 1901. Gift of Ansel
Adams, 1974.0037.1963.
from a literary character in popular childrens

books by the Canadian author Palmer Cox.
Eastmans astute union of product naming, with
a built-in youth appeal, and inventive advertising
placement had great consequence for the rise of
modern marketing practices and mass consumerism
in the twentieth century.
The Brownie was designed and manufactured
by Frank A. Brownell, who had produced all of
Eastman Kodaks cameras from the beginning. The
use of inexpensive materials in the cameras construction and George Eastmans insistence that all
distributors sell the camera on consignment enabled
the company to control the cameras $1 price tag
and keep it within easy reach of consumers pocketbooks. More than 150,000 Brownies were shipped
in the rst year of production alone, a staggering
success for a company whose largest single-year
production to date had been 55,000 cameras (the
No. 2 Bullet, in 1896). The Brownie launched a
family of nearly 200 camera models and related
accessories, which over the next 60 years helped to
make Kodak a household name.
Folding Pocket Kodak

The Kodak marketing plan was to sell new customers interested in photography an affordable
Brownie camera, then move them up to better, more
expensive models. The company catalogs were full
of such model lines priced in incremental steps.
From the basic box camera, the next logical step
was the Folding Pocket Kodak. (See Fig. 2.) Introduced in 1897 (at the time it was an upgrade from
the Pocket Kodak, the model replaced by the
Brownie), the FPK, as it was commonly known,
became the rst of a long line of folding bellows
cameras in common use for the next half century.
These cameras were a popular travel accessory
because they produced the large negative desired
by photographers, yet upon folding became small
enough to t into a carrying case or coat pocket. At
Fig. 2. No. 3A Folding Pocket Kodak Model B-4, w/
that time of undependable light sources and a cumZeiss Tessar Lens. Eastman Kodak Company,
bersome enlargement process, the physical size of
Rochester, New York, ca. 1908. Gift of Eastman Kodak
the camera usually determined the nished picture
Company, 2001.1559.0012.
size. The 3A (3A is a Kodak camera format introduced in 1903 with the No. 3A Folding Pocket
Kodak; it produced 3 5-in. images on No. 122 lm) was especially appealing, as it was available
at many price points. Largely determined by its various lens and shutter combinations, the 3A
functioned both as a more serious entry-level camera, and also as the companys agship amateur
product. Due to its prominent position in the company product line and long production run, the 3A
received numerous upgrades throughout its history.
32
In its early years, most 3A cameras were tted with Bausch & Lomb (B&L) lenses and shutters.
Eastman had rst turned to B&L as the supplier of lenses for his original Kodak camera back in 1888, a
year after B&L produced its rst photographic objective. However, Eastman Kodak offered other
options to the more serious photographer, as the 3A was available with the best lenses from Europe,
including Englands Cooke Anastigmat (19071912) and Germanys Georz Dagor (19031908), or
Zeiss Tessar (19081910). Bausch & Lomb signed a licensing agreement with Zeiss to produce the
Tessar in Rochester, and of course the 3A was available with those lenses (19061912). Eastman Kodak
entered into its own agreement with Zeiss, and the 3A was produced with the Zeiss Kodak Anastigmat
(19091912). Eastman Kodak Company began producing lenses of its own design in 1913; the 3A
received the rst version of the Kodak Anastigmat in 1914. The 3A was the rst production camera to
be tted with the coupled rangender, which put Kodak about 15 years ahead of most other
manufacturers. Beginning in the 1930s, high-end cameras such as the Contax (by Zeiss Ikon) and
the Leica (by E. Leitz) were tted with coupled rangenders. Even today, most higher-end digital
cameras use a form of this technology.
Institute of Optics
World War I changed the optical landscape in the United States. The industry relied on German
manufacturers for the supply of high quality optical glass, optics, and engineers. A number of steps were
taken to remedy the situation, the rst being establishing The Optical Society (OSA) in 1916. Under the
leadership of Perley G. Nutting, and with the support of optical scientists in Rochester, the optical
center of the United States, the OSAs mission was to promote and disseminate knowledge of optics and
photonics. This was accomplished with published journals and by holding conferences, thus establishing a network of information exchange. The University of Rochester, with nancial support from B&L
and Eastman Kodak Company, established the Institute of Applied Optics (now known as the Institute
of Optics) in 1929. The president of the University, Reverend Benjamin Rush Rhees, hired Rudolf
Kingslake, graduate of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, where he studied
under Alexander Eugen Conrady, to teach at the new school. Kingslake became the head of Eastman
Kodak Companys Optical Design Department in 1937, a position he held until retiring in 1968.
Kingslake continued to teach at the University of Rochester during his Kodak years; he continued
teaching at the university into the 1980s.
Kodak Research Labs/Color Photography

The advancement of photography is about more than cameras and lenses; improvements in sensitized
materials has always played an extremely important role. The founding of the Kodak Research
Laboratories may be George Eastmans greatest contribution to photography. Established expressly for
the empirical study of sensitized materials, the Kodak Labs were among the rst of their kind in the
United States. Impressed with the laboratories he saw while visiting Germany in 1911, Eastman realized
that the future of the industry would be color photography. He knew from his own early experimentation in emulsion making that it would take more than lone individuals experimenting on their own in
home-brew labs to facilitate the future. For the founding director of the Kodak Labs, Eastman hired C.
E. K. (Charles Edward Kenneth) Mees, managing director and a partner at Wratten & Wainwright, a
dry plate manufacturer in England best known for introducing panchromatic dry plates. To acquire
Meess services, Eastman bought his employer.
Of the many developments by the Kodak Labs, the most important was color lm. The search for
color in photography dates back to the mediums earliest days. For the most part, colored photographs
were exactly that, photographs with hand-applied color. There was a so-called color version of the
daguerreotype known as the Hillotype, though it is up for debate as to whether these plates had color or
not. Color photography largely remained a hand-applied art or rather complicated laboratory
experiment based on James Clerk Maxwells three-color experiments until 1903 with the introduction
33
of Autochrome plates by Frances Lumire brothers. Autochrome used the additive color process, with
the plates rst coated with a mosaic screen made of microscopic potato starch grains, randomly dyed
red, green, and blue; the empty spaces between the starch grains were lled with black and then coated
with a panchromatic photographic emulsion. This rather odd-sounding system did work, but due to the
ltering nature of the plates, exposure times were quite long.
Kodachrome is usually considered to be the rst practical color lm. Two musician-scientists,
Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, began investigating color photography, ling their rst
patent application in 1921. (Godowsky and Mannes were boyhood friends who shared a common
interest in music and photography. Mannes earned a bachelors degree in physics at Harvard College
but worked as a musical composer at the New York Institute of Art. Godowsky studied physics and
chemistry as well as the violin at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was a soloist and rst
violinist with the Los Angeles and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestras.) C. E. K. Mees was
informed of their research by a friend, Robert Wood, the next year, prompting Mees to travel to meet
with Mannes at New York Citys Chemists Club. Impressed with Mannes, Mees decided to assist the
two young scientists in their work, rst by supplying them with evenly coated plates, and then as ad hoc
members of the Kodak Research Labs. By 1930, Godowsky and Mannes had become regular members
of the company and moved to Rochester. The result was Kodachrome lm, rst introduced in 1935 as a
16-mm cin lm and the next year for still photography as a 35-mm transparency lm. The rst multilayered lm, Kodachrome consisted of three separate black-and-white layers (with a yellow ltering
layer), for recording cyan, yellow, magenta, the subtractive color primary colors. When exposed, these
black-and-white layers acted as placeholders to which color dyes were added during processing.
Kodachome is still considered to be the most permanent color lm.
35-mm Precision Cameras

George Eastmans easy-to-use Kodak camera, introduced in 1888, marks the beginning of point-andshoot photography. Since using it required no special knowledge, it was an ideal camera for the newly
conceived market of amateur novice photographers. Thomas Edison used lm from the Kodak, slit to
35 mm and then perforated on both edges, in his 1890s experiments perfecting the Kinetoscope, the
rst motion picture lm viewer. 35-mm lm became the standard lm size of the motion picture
industry. As lm quality improved over the next couple of decades, a number of companies
around the world began to experiment with the format for still photography. The Multi Speed
Shutter Company of New York City (a company that also manufactured motion picture projectors)
introduced the Simplex camera in 1914, the rst still camera to use the now standard 24 36-mm
image size on 35-mm-wide lm; this was twice that used for motion pictures 18 24 mm. Soon after,
other companiessuch as Jules Richard of Paris, France, with the Homos (the rst 35-mm stereo
camera) and New Ideas Manufacturing of New York City with the Tourist Multiplewould market
cameras using 35-mm lm. These cameras used lm acquired as leftover ends from the motion picture
industry. It was a novel idea, but none were very successful, as most snapshot photographers
preferred using the well-established box or folding cameras. Still, a successful precision 35-mm
camera was on the horizon.
Leica A
Starting about 1905, when he worked at the rm of Carl Zeiss in Jena, Germany, Oskar Barnack
(18791936), an asthmatic who hiked to improve his health, tried to create a small pocketable camera
to take on his outings. At the time, cameras using the most common format of 13 18 cm (5 7 in.)
were quite large and not well suited for hiking. Around 1913, Barnack, by then an employee in charge
of the experimental department of the microscope maker Ernst Leitz Optical Works in Wetzlar,
designed and hand built several prototypes of a small precision camera that produced 24 36-mm
images on leftover ends of 35-mm motion picture lm. Three of these prototypes survive. The most
34
complete one has been dubbed the Ur-Leica,

meaning the rst or Original Leica, and is in the
museum of todays rm of Leica Camera AG in
Solms, Germany.
Barnack used one of his cameras in 1914 to
take reportage-type pictures of a local ood and of
the mobilization for World War I. That same year,
his boss, Ernst Leitz II, used one on a trip to the
United States. However, no further development of
the small camera took place until 1924, when Leitz
decided to make a pilot run of 25 cameras, serial
numbered 101 through 125. Still referred to as the
Fig. 3. O-Series Leica. Ernst Leitz GmbH, Wetzlar,
Barnack camera, these prototypes were loaned to
Germany, 1923. George Eastman House collection,
Leitz managers, distributors, and professional
1974.0084.0111.
photographers for eld testing. Interestingly, the
evaluations were not enthusiastic, as the testers
thought the format too small and the controls too ddly, which they were. For instance, the shutter
speeds were listed as the various distances between the curtains, instead of the fraction of a second it
would allow light to pass. In spite of its reviews, Leitz authorized the cameras production, basing his
decision largely on a desire to keep his workers employed during the post-World-War-I economic
depression. An improved version of the O-Series Leica, the Leica I, or Model A, with a noninterchangeable lens was introduced to the market at the 1925 Spring Fair in Leipzig, Germany.
(See Fig. 3.) The name Leica, which derives from Leitz Camera, appeared only on the lens cap.
Contax I (540/24)
The successful introduction of the Leica camera was not lost on Zeiss Ikon AG of Dresden, Germany.
Formed in 1926 as the merger of Contessa-Nettel, Goerz, Ernemann and Ica, Zeiss Ikon was the largest
camera manufacturer in Europe. Zeiss was one of the leading manufacturers of optical devices, with its
roots dating back to optician Carl Zeiss. Zeiss began as a lens and microscope manufacturer in 1847.
He hired physicist Ernst Abbe in 1866 as research director; Abbe designed the rst refractometer in
1868, a device used to measure the index of refraction of optical glass. Abbe hired Otto Schott in 1883
to develop new types of glass necessary for reducing reection in microscope objectives, then hired Paul
Rudolph to design photographic lenses with glass developed by Schott. After the passing of Carl Zeiss
in 1888, Abbe bought out Zeisss son Roderich and established the Carl Zeiss Foundation. Unusual in
its day, the Zeiss foundation was partially owned by its workers. Many of the classic lenses used in
photography, such as the Anastigmat (1890), Planar (1895), Unar (1899), and Tessar (1902),
originated at Zeiss, under the direction of Paul Rudolph.
The Zeiss Ikon catalog of 1927 listed over 100 camera models from the small pocket-sized
Piccolette roll lm camera to the Universal Jewel professional folding dry plate camera (Ansel Adams
used one). Its camera line included the Deckrullo focal plane shutter models and the Miroex reex.
And like Eastman Kodak Company, along with cameras Zeiss Ikon sold a complete line of
photography equipment for darkroom and motion picture projection. With the introduction and
success of the Leica from one of its smaller competitors, Zeissconsidered to be the gold standard of
camera makersneeded to come up with a better version of the precision 35-mm camera. The answer
was the Contax, introduced in 1932. (See Fig. 4.) On paper it was exactly that, a better Leica. The
Contax used a built-in coupled rangender, with a longer base than the Leicas, for more accurate
focusing, vertical-traveling focal plane shutter, with speeds to 1/1250 s, which was more than twice as
fast as the Leicas 1/500. The Contax had a removable back for easy loading, in contrast to the Leica,
which rather awkwardly loaded through its removable bottom plate. And most important, the
Contax used Zeiss lenses, which were far superior to those used by the Leica. But there was one
problem: the Contax was an unreliable picture taker, with most of the problems relating to its shutter.
35
Over the years Zeiss tried to remedy this, but it

could never match the durability of the Leicas
rubberized cloth shutter.
Kodak Retina
Fig. 4.
Contax I (f). Zeiss Ikon AG, Dresden,

Germany, ca. 1932. Gift of 3M; ex-collection Louis
Walton Sipley. 1977.0415.0004.
August Nagel, of Contessa Nettel, dissatised with

his companys merger with Zeiss Ikon, left and
formed a new company, Nagel Werke in 1928.
Eastman Kodak Company purchased Nagel Werke
in 1932, becoming Kodak AG, the companys German manufacturing arm. In 1934, Eastman Kodak
Company introduced the Retina, its rst precision
35-mm camera, designed to compete with the
Leica. Unlike the Leica and Contax, the Retina
was a folding 35-mm camera with a permanently
mounted lens. Introduced with the Retina was the
Kodak 35-mm daylight loading lm magazine,
which became the standard used on just about every
35-mm camera. The Kodak lm magazine used a
built-in heat-sealed velvet light trap still in use
today. Prior to this, the other 35-mm cameras used
their own unique lm magazines, tted with some
type of light trap mechanism connected in some way
to the bottom of the camera (Leica) or with separate
supply and take-up housing (Contax).
Kodak AG went on to produce some 50 different models of the Retina camera through the
mid-1960s.
Super Kodak Six-20

The Super Kodak Six-20 was the rst production
camera to feature automatic exposure (AE) control.
(See Fig. 5.) Aimed at removing the exposure guesswork for photographers, the cameras shutterpreferred AE control meant that the photographer
chose the shutter speed and the camera would then
choose the correct lens opening. Kodaks engineers accomplished this feat by mechanically coupling a selenium photocell light meter, located just
Fig. 5. Super Kodak Six-20 Eastman Kodak
above the lens, to the lens aperture.
Company, Rochester, New York, 1938. Gift of Eastman
This advancement, though groundbreaking,
Kodak Company, 001.0636.0001.
was not picked up by most camera manufacturers
for some 20 years after the debut of the Super
Six-20. These days, automatic exposure is a standard feature on almost all cameras, so it is not much
of a stretch to call the Super Kodak Six-20 the rst smart camera.
But auto exposure was not the only cutting-edge feature of the Super Six-20. It was also the rst
Kodak camera to use a common window for both the rangender and the viewnder. The lm advances
with a single-stroke lever, which also cocks the shutter at the end of the stroke, thus preventing double
exposures. And like auto exposure, these features would not become common on cameras for many
36
years. Features aside, the Super Kodak Six-20 is one of the most attractive cameras ever marketed. Its
lovely clamshell exterior design was styled by legendary industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague.
All this innovation came at a rather high cost, in both money and performance. The Super Kodak
Six-20, which in 1938 retailed for $225 (more than $2,000 today), had a reputation for being
somewhat unreliablethe built-in self-timer was known to lock up the shutter. Since few units were
manufactured, just 719, it is one of the rarest of Kodak production cameras.
Conclusion
Camera research and development largely went on hold during World War II. Much of the German
photo manufacturing industry was destroyed by the end of the war. The post-war era also saw the
division of the Zeiss factories, split between East and West Germany. The low cost of post-World-WarII German labor had a direct impact on American manufacturing, causing most U.S. makers to
concentrate on inexpensive point-and-shoot cameras only. And the U.S., in trying to strengthen Japan,
helped re-establish the edgling camera manufacturing there, laying the seeds for what became the
premier camera manufacturing power for the rest of the century.
37
PRE-1940
OSA and the Early Days of Vision

Research
Patricia Daukantas
y the second decade of the twentieth century, scientists studying human vision had come a
long way from the days of the ancient Greeks, who debated whether light rays shot
themselves out of the eyeball or emanated from objects in the visual eld [1]. Nevertheless, the whole area of vision, especially the retinas reaction to light, remained an important topic
of research as The Optical Society (OSA) was organizing itself.
In the early days of the OSA, scientists had come to realize that vision sat at the intersection
of three elds: physiology, for the anatomy of the eye; physics, for the action of stimuli on the eye;
and psychology, governing how the conscious brain interprets the eyes sensations [2]. Reecting
the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, vision-related articles published in 1920 were
distributed among 58 different journals from elds ranging from physics and engineering to
zoology and pathology.
Between the two world wars, the scientists studying photochemistryincluding two who
would become OSA Honorary Membersprogressed from the simple eyes of sea creatures to the
complexities of the human visual system. Researchers learned that the retina contains vitamin A,
leading to generations of parents telling their children, Eat your carrotstheyre good for your
eyesight! The new understanding of the eye paved the way for advances in vision correction and
optical instruments.
Visual Reception and Photochemical Theory

In the very rst issue of the Journal of The Optical Society of America (JOSA), two OSA
presidents addressed some of the fundamental questions associated with human vision. Leonard
Thompson Troland (18891932) published his theory of how the eye responds to light [3]. Perley
G. Nutting (18731949) explored the status of a general photochemical theory that would apply
to both the eye and photography and noted the similarities in the characteristic curves of
photographic lm and the eyes response to light [4] (see Fig. 1).
Nutting, who had tried to start an optical society several years before OSAs founding,
served as the new organizations president through 1917. In his later years his focus shifted to
geophysics. Troland (Fig. 2), who served as OSA president in 1922 and 1923, died in the prime of
life when he fell off a cliff on Mount Wilson in California. Though he was never elected to the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the academy gives an annual award in his name to young
researchers who study the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. In
photometry, the troland is a cgs unit for physical stimulation of the eye by light.
By 1919, OSA was becoming a leader in dening standards of visibility. That year, the
Societys standards committee on visual sensitometry, led by Nutting, summarized [5] the extent of
scientists quantitative knowledge of the visibility of radiation, detection thresholds of intensity and
contrast, color vision, rates of adaptation to changes in light, and absolute sensibility, which
takes into account the area of the retina exposed to light. For example, it was already well
established that the human cone is most sensitive to light with a wavelength of 556 nm.
38
Fig. 1. P. G. Nuttings comparison of the sensitivity of photographic lm (left) and human vision (right) to light [4].
For lm, optical density is plotted against the logarithm of exposure; for vision, reaction is plotted against the
logarithm of light intensity. The lower curve on the vision graph, photometric sensibility, was determined
experimentally, according to Nutting, whereas the upper curve, sensation, was determined by integration.
Photochemistry: Hecht,
Hartline, and Wald
During the 1920s and 1930s, three scientists whose
talents bridged the elds of physics, chemistry, and
biology made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the molecules that react in the presence or absence of light.
Born in an Austrian town now part of Poland,
but raised in the United States, Selig Hecht (1892
1947) (Fig. 3) explored the photochemistry of vision
by studying animals whose visual systems are much
simpler than those of humans: the worm Ciona and
the clam Mya. Those organisms reactions to light
were slow enough that they could be measured
without sophisticated apparatus [6].
Hecht began his studies of the photoreceptor
process immediately after receiving his Ph.D., when
he spent a summer at the facility now known as the
Scripps Institution of Oceanography. There he investigated the sensitivity of Ciona to light. As he moved
Fig. 2. Leonard Thompson Troland, OSA
among several institutions in the United States and
president from 1922 to 1924. (AIP Emilio Segre Visual
England, he studied the rate at which visual purple
Archives.)
(now known as rhodopsin) decomposes upon exposure to light [7], the bleaching of rhodopsin in solution [6], and (with Robert E. Williams) the spectral sensitivity of human rod vision [8]. Hecht ended up at
Columbia University, where, with his frequent collaborator Simon Shlaer, he built an instrument for
39
Fig. 3.
Selig Hecht. (AIP Emilio Segre Visual

Archives, Physics Today Collection.)
Fig. 4.
Haldan Keffer Hartline. (Eugene N. Kone,

Rockefeller Institute, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual
40
measuring the dark adaptation of the human eye,

leading to one of the classic experiments in eye
sensitivity, still taught today [9].
Hecht considered himself a physiologist, but he
served a term as an OSA director at large and
another term on JOSAs editorial board [6]. In
1941, OSA awarded him the Frederic Ives Medal
for overall distinction in optics.
Trained as a physician, Haldan Keffer Hartline
(19031983) (Fig. 4) never practiced medicine. Indeed, after receiving his M.D. from Johns Hopkins,
he spent a year Europe studying mathematics and
physics under Arnold Sommerfeld and Werner
Heisenberg. He was disappointed that he lacked
the background to keep up with the pioneering
physicists, but his quantitative bent served him well
in his research career.
Hartline spent the 1930s as a medical physicist at
the University of Pennsylvania, where he investigated
the visual systems of the horseshoe crab (Limulus
polyphemus). In 1932, he and colleague Clarence H.
Graham made the rst recording of the electrical
activity of a single ber taken from the optic nerve
of a horseshoe crab. (Five years earlier, another team
had studied the electrical pulses of the trunk of an eels
optic nerve, but could not separate the bers.) Their
work revealed that the intensity of the light falling on
the photoreceptor is reected in the rate of discharge
of the nerves electrical pulses [10,11].
Subsequently, Hartline progressed to studies of
single optic-nerve cells from vertebrate retinas and
measured their varying responses to light: some
signaled during steady illumination, whereas others
responded to the initiation or cessation of light
[10,12]. By 1940, he came to realize that the ganglion cells in the retina received exciting and inhibiting stimuli through various pathways from
different photoreceptors, and the optic nerve ber,
attached to the ganglion, serves as the nal pipeline
to transmit the signals to the brain [13]. Finally,
Hartline discovered the effect now known as lateral
inhibition in the Limulus compound eye sometime
during the late 1930s, although he did not publish a
report on it until 1949 [10].
George Wald (19061997) (Fig. 5), one of
Hechts graduate students at Columbia University,
took his mentors work further. As a student,
Wald worked on the visual functioning of the
Drosophila fruit y and participated in Hechts
photoreceptor research. After he completed his
doctorate in 1932, Wald identied the substance
known as vitamin Awhich was itself discovered
only in 1931in the retina.
The German scientist Franz Christian Boll

had discovered rhodopsin, the primary lightsensitive pigment in the retinas rod cells, back
in 1876, but nobody before Wald knew the exact
chemical mechanism that made the substance
react to light. During postdoctoral research in the
laboratory of German biochemist Otto Warburg,
Wald took the absorption spectrum of rhodopsin
and found that the pigment contains carotenoids,
which he found intriguing, because physicians had
already connected nutritional night blindness with
vitamin A deciency [14].
Working with a Swiss researcher, Paul Karrer,
Wald extracted vitamin A from the retinas of cattle,
sheep, and pigs, and then moved to the Heidelberg
lab of another Nobel laureate, Otto Meyerhof. With
the clock ticking down on his time in Europeafter
Adolf Hitler came to power, the U.S. National
Research Council recalled the young Jewish postdoc
homeWald used a shipment of frogs, delivered
while everyone else was vacationing, to gain a
revolutionary insight. Since dark-adapted retinas
Fig. 5. George Wald. (Photo by Bachrach.)
contained a carotenoid slightly different from the
vitamin A found in light-adapted retinas, he reasoned that the carotenoid, which he initially called retinene, was bound to the protein in rhodopsin and
was released upon exposure to light, then gradually recombined to the rhodopsin protein to reverse the
process [14]. (Later scientists changed retinenes name to retinal.)
Wald moved to Harvard University in 1934 and continued studying the chemical reactions within
the retina both at Harvard and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He
began investigating pigment molecules in the retinas cone cells, but World War II duties interrupted
that line of work, so the important research he and his co-workers conducted on the red-sensitive
pigment of the cones was not completed until the mid-1950s.
Hartline and Wald, along with FinnishSwedish scientist Ragnar Granit (19001991), shared the
1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their studies of vision systems. Hartlines 1940 JOSA
paper was cited as one of the works for which he won the Nobel [15]. Hartline and Wald also were
named OSA Honorary Members, the former in 1980, the latter in 1992.
Lasting Consequences
Many of the discoveries about the eye as a visual system did not bear practical fruit until after the
interwar (19161940) period. The studies of sensitivity performance and contrast thresholds of the
human eye formed the basis of everything from television and computer displays to the design of
highway signs, which must be read in mere milliseconds for safetys sake [16,17]. That early twentieth
century work continues to enhance many aspects of our twenty-rst century life.
References
1. J. P. C. Southall, Early pioneers in physiological optics, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 6, 827842 (1922).
2. L. T. Troland, The Present Status of Visual Science, Bulletin of the National Research Council of the
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.A.) (1922), Vol. 5, No. 27, pp. 12.
41
3. L. T. Troland, The nature of the visual receptor process, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 1, 314 (1917).
4. P. G. Nutting, A photochemical theory of vision and photographic action, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 1(1),
3136 (1917).
5. P. G. Nutting, 1919 report of standards committee on visual sensitometry, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 4(2),
5579 (1919).
6. G. Wald, Selig Hecht, 18921947: a biographical memoir, in Biographical Memoirs (The National
Academy Press, 1991), Vol. 60, pp. 80101.
7. S. Hecht, Photochemistry of visual purple: I. The kinetics of the decomposition of visual purple by
light, J. Gen. Physiol. 3(1), 113 (1920).
8. S. Hecht and R. E. Williams, The visibility of monochromatic radiation and the absorption spectrum of
visual purple, J. Gen. Physiol. 5(1), 133 (1922).
9. S. Hecht and S. Shlaer, An adaptometer for measuring human dark adaptation, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 28,
269 (1938).
10. F. Ratliff, Haldan Keffer Hartline, 19031983: a biographical memoir in Biographical Memoirs (The
National Academy Press, 1990), Vol. 59, pp. 196213.
11. H. K. Hartline and C. H. Graham, Nerve impulses from single receptors in the eye, J. Cell. Comp.
Physiol. 1, 277295 (1932).
12. H. K. Hartline, Intensity and duration in the excitation of single photoreceptor units, J. Cell. Comp.
Physiol. 5, 229247 (1934).
13. H. K. Hartline, The nerve messages in the bers of the visual pathway, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 30, 239247
(1940).
14. J. E. Dowling, George Wald, 19061997: a biographical memoir in Biographical Memoirs (The
National Academy Press, 2000), Vol. 78, pp. 298317.
15. J. N. Howard, Milestone JOSA articles from 19171973, Opt. Photon. News 18(11), 2021 (2007).
16. A. Rose, The sensitivity performance of the human eye on an absolute scale, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 38,
196208 (1948).
17. H. R. Blackwell, Contrast thresholds of the human eye, J. Opt. Sci. Am. 36, 624632 (1946).
42
PRE1940
Evolution of Color Science through

the Lens of OSA
Roy S. Berns
he Optical Society (OSA) was the dominant professional society in the evolution of color
science, both through its many technical committees and through the Journal. This
chapter highlights some of the many signicant activities and publications that occurred
through the 1950s.
OSA established the Committee on Colorimetry in 1919 chaired by I. G. Priest from the
National Bureau of Standards and during its rst year circulated a preliminary draft [1]. The
committees rst report was published in the Journal in 1922, authored by the current
chairman and president of the Society, L. T. Troland [2]. This remarkable 64-page report
outlined the basis of photometry and colorimetry, including visibility and color-matching
function data (referred to as the OSA excitation curves), terminology for visual description,
chromaticity diagrams, complementary wavelengths, standard illuminants, color temperature,
optimal color lters for trichromatic color reproduction, visual colorimetry, and transformation of primaries. All of these concepts would be central to establishing the 1924 V visibility
curve and the 1931 CIE colorimetric system, XYZ and xyY. The Colorimetry Committee was
a driving force in the evolution of modern colorimetry, culminating with the book The Science
of Color published in 1953 [3]. The book indicates the breadth of expertise of the committee
and that color science is multi-disciplinary as it includes physics, optics, physiology, psychophysics, and history beginning with our rst use of colored materials hundreds of thousands of
years ago.
The rst color order system that was based on extensive psychophysics was the Munsell
system. The Munsell Value scale quantied visual compression by establishing the relationship between incident light and perceived lightness [4]. It has been used to support Stevens
exponential model of visual compression and relate luminance factor to CIE lightness, L*. An
OSA committee performed extensive research leading to the current denition of the Munsell
system [5]. These data were used by Adams to derive the precursor to CIELAB [6]. The
Munsell system is a cylindrical system, and as a consequence, neighboring samples are not
equidistant. In addition, samples of constant hue vary in either lightness or chroma, but not
both simultaneously as occurs in common coloration. In the late 1940s an OSA committee,
chaired by D. B. Judd from the National Bureau of Standards, was established to develop a
new color order system where samples were equidistant in all three dimensions based on a
regular rhombohedral crystal lattice structure to [7]. The OSA Uniform Color Scales were the
result thirty years later. Both systems are still used to develop and evaluate colorimetric-based
color spaces for visual uniformity.
Any quantitative color description of objects depends on measuring the spectral reectance
factor. A breakthrough occurred during the 1930s when A. C. Hardy, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed the rst recording spectrophotometer whose
illumination geometry was optimized for measuring materials via an integrating sphere where
the specular component could be included or excluded, the latter correlating with the
appearance of glossy materials [8]. General Electric manufactured the Hardy spectrophotometer. By the late 1940s, it was possible to interface the instrument to an automatic tristimulus
integrator [9], and as a result, color measurements were reported as a spectral graph and CIE
43
tristimulus values. One drawback of this approach was the high cost. Hunter made color measurement much more accessible with the development of a color-difference meter using color lters and
three photodetectors, rst presented at an OSA Annual Meeting in 1948 [10].
When the CIE system was promulgated in 1931, there were three standard sources, A, B, and C,
representing incandescent, sunlight, and daylight, respectively. Source C was produced by ltering
incandescent lighting with bluish liquid lters. Such a light was very decient in UV and shortwavelength visible radiation compared with natural daylight. Measurements of daylight, principal
component analysis, and a very clever approach to calculate the eigenvector scalars for a specic
correlated color temperature resulted in the CIE D series illuminants [11, 12]. Today, CIE illuminants
D50 and D65 are used extensively in color reproduction and color manufacturing, respectively.
All specications include tolerances, and as early as 1932 [13], the Journal began publishing
research demonstrating the CIE systems lack of uniformity with respect to color discrimination,
research proposing linear and nonlinear transformations that improved correlation, and psychophysical data from discrimination experiments. At the forefront of this research was D. L. MacAdam, a
student of Hardy at MIT, who went on to have a distinguished career at the Eastman Kodak Research
Laboratories. In the early 1940s, he built an apparatus to measure color-matching variance that
resulted in the MacAdam ellipses, still used as a discrimination dataset [14]. His research and
leadership resulted in the 1960 uv and 1976 uv uniform chromaticity scale diagrams and the 1976
L*a*b* and L*U*V* uniform color spaces.
An interesting research topic was designing color reproduction systems that could be related to
colorimetry by linear transformation. During the late 1930s, Hardy and Wurzburg [15], MacAdam
[16], and Yule [17] laid the groundwork for todays color management for both additive and
subtractive imaging systems.
We all use manufactured products meeting a color specication. Predicting and controlling a recipe
is invaluable for coloration systems where the colorants and media both absorb and scatter light. The
theory proposed in 1931 by P. Kubelka and F. Munk and published in the Journal in 1948 [18]
continues to be used successfully in textiles, plastics, and coatings. In 1942, J. L. Saunderson
demonstrated its effectiveness for the coloring of plastics, particularly by accounting for refractive
index discontinuities at the surface [19].
Today, color science has evolved from tristimulus XYZ, through L*a*b* and L*u*v*, to colorappearance spaces such as CIECAM97s and CIECAM02. A key requirement of such spaces is
accounting for the effects of chromatic adaptation. Such research began in the 1950s and the seminal
experiments by R. W. Burnham, R. M. Evans, and S. M. Newhall from Eastman Kodak remain reliable
and viable data [20].
I will end my highlight tour with Ref. [21], which describes how MacAdam created separation plates
for printing both the color gamut of a set of offset printing inks and a spectrum. A 19-page article
appeared in the 3 July 1944 issue of Life magazine, titled Color: it is the response of vision to wave
lengths of light [22]. This remarkable article includes colored images of a dispersed spectrum, additive
and subtractive mixing, principles of selective absorption of colored lters, spectral reectance curves of a
lemon and a tomato, the Hardy recording spectrophotometer, the visible spectrum, the Munsell system,
an afterimage demonstration using the American ag, and several other optical illusions. The 1931 CIE
system was used to calibrate the color separations where dominant wavelength represented the spectral
hues and, in turn, mixtures of the printing inks. Incredibly, I have MacAdams copy of the article. The
article summarizes color science and, indirectly, the tremendous impact the OSA has had on its evolution.
References
1. 1919 Report of the Standards Committee on Colorimetry, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 4, 186187 (1920).
2. L. T. Troland, Report of Committee on Colorimetry for 192021, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 6, 527591
(1922).
3. Committee on Colorimetry of The Optical Society of America, The Science of Color (Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1953).
44
4. A. E. O. Munsell, L. L. Sloan, and I. H. Godlove, Neutral Value Scales. I. Munsell Neutral Value
Scale, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 23, 394402 (1933).
5. S. M. Newhall, D. Nickerson, and D. B. Judd, Final report of the O.S.A. Subcommittee on the Spacing
of the Munsell Colors, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 33, 385411 (1943).
6. E. Q. Adams, X-Z planes in the 1931 I.C.I. system of colorimetry, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 32, 168173
(1942).
7. D. B. Judd, Progress Report by Optical Society of America Committee on Uniform Color Scales, J.
Opt. Soc. Am. 45, 673676 (1955).
8. A. C. Hardy, A new recording spectrophotometer, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 25, 30310 (1935).
9. H. R. Davidson and L. W. Imm, A continuous, automatic tristimulus integrator for use with the
recording spectrophotometer, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 39, 942944 (1949).
10. R. S. Hunter, Photoelectric color difference meter, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 48, 985993 (1958).
11. H. R. Condit and F. Grum, Spectral energy distribution of daylight, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 54, 937940
(1964).
12. D. B. Judd, D. L. MacAdam, G. Wyszecki, H. W. Budde, H. R. Condit, S. T. Henderson, and J. L.
Simonds, Spectral distribution of typical daylight as a function of correlated color temperature, J. Opt.
Soc. Am. 54, 10311040 (1964).
13. D. B. Judd, Chromaticity sensibility to stimulus differences, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 22, 72107 (1932).
14. D. L. MacAdam, Visual sensitivities to color differences in daylight, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 32, 247273
(1942).
15. A. C. Hardy and F. L. Wurzburg, Jr., The theory of three-color reproduction, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 27,
227240 (1937).
16. D. L. MacAdam, Photographic aspects of the theory of three-color reproduction, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 28,
399415 (1938).
17. J. A. C. Yule, The theory of subtractive color photography, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 28, 419426 (1938).
18. P. Kubelka, New contributions to the optics of intensely light-scattering materials. Part I, J. Opt. Soc.
Am. 38, 448448 (1948).
19. J. L. Saunderson, Calculation of the color of pigmented plastics, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 32, 727729 (1942).
20. R. W. Burnham, R. M. Evans, and S. M. Newhall, Prediction of color appearance with different
adaptation illuminations, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 47, 3542 (1957).
21. D. L. MacAdam, Design of a printed spectrum, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 35, 293293 (1945).
22. Life magazine, 3 July 1944.
45
PRE1940
19411959
19601974
19751990
1991PRESENT
19411959
Introduction: Advances in Optical

Science and Technology
Paul Kelley
World War II and the Start of the Cold War

The decades of the 1940s and 1950s saw tremendous change. The United States entered the war
as the leading industrial power. It became even more dominant as the war progressed and the
European Allies and the Axis Powers suffered great damage. The Cold War, which started
shortly after World War II, led to further changes in the industrial outlook of the United States
and the world in general. The harnessing of science in the national interest had become a priority
prior to the war, and the Cold War and the development of nuclear weapons made its application
even more imperative. At the same time, increased industrial sophistication led to more reliance
on science to facilitate change and to the application of the tools of science in everyday industrial
activity. A diverse group of scientic entrepreneurs developed new technological applications in
academia, small start-ups, and corporate research laboratories. Optics and applications of optics
played an important role in this progress.
In war time, the United States could not rely on Germany for optical materials and
sophisticated optical designs. This had occurred in the First World War, and the U.S. did not
want to have this problem repeated. Through the National Defense Research Committee
(NRDC) a robust capability was developed for designing and manufacturing innovative optics
for aerial reconnaissance. Optical scientists and engineers also contributed to the development of
gun sights, range nders, and submarine periscopes. Anti-reection coatings, which had been
introduced in the 1930s, were developed and applied to military optics. Camouage was another
important area of optics that rapidly progressed during the war.
In the 1950s Edwin Land and James Baker persuaded President Eisenhower to develop the U-2
for surveillance of the Soviet Union. Baker had been a leading designer of aircraft reconnaissance
cameras. His skill at optical design together with Lands close collaboration with the aircraft
designer, Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, led to a well-integrated, optimal system still in use today. The
U-2 was designed to y above the existing intercept altitude of Soviet antiaircraft missiles and the
U.S. was quite surprised when the USSR deployed a more capable missile system.
In 1947 Land introduced instant photography. In the black-and-white process, two sheets of
paper are employed, one to produce a negative image, the other a positive. The same basic
method as in conventional photography is used to produce a negative image. The negative paper
is coated with small crystals of silver halide. Exposure to light produces some free silver atoms on
the crystallites. After exposure, liquid chemicals are released that begin the development. The free
atoms act as a nucleus for further free silver production, turning the exposed crystallites dark.
Some of the silver halide crystals that are not initially exposed to light are transported to the
adjacent second sheet of paper and then developed to produce a positive image. The Polaroid
camera soon became very popular because of the excitement of instantly seeing ones photographs. Polacolor that produced color prints was introduced in 1963.
Applied spectroscopy, which saw increased application during the war, blossomed after the
war as manufacturing became increasingly complex and diverse [1]. Synthetic rubber was crucial to
49
the military, and infrared spectroscopy played a vital role in the rubber manufacturing process. The entry
of Perkin-Elmer and Beckman into the spectrometer business was motivated by the use of their equipment
in rubber manufacturing and fuel rening. Chemists, biologists, and other scientists soon came to
embrace the use of physical measurements, most particularly optical spectroscopy in the infrared
region. In 1950, the rst Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy
(Pittcon) was held. Optical techniques continue to play a central role in this enormous conference,
which in 2015 had 16,000 attendees, 925 exhibitors, and more than 2000 sessions.
In 1957 ber endoscopes were used for medical imaging by Hirschowitz employing bundles of clad
bers developed by Peters and Curtiss at Michigan [2,3]. In 1930 Heinrich Lamm demonstrated the
concept of imaging through ber bundles, H. H. Hopkins developed the berscope using coherent ber
bundles in the early 1950s [4], and, also in the early 1950s, A. C. S. van Heel proposed the use of
cladding to avoid crosstalk between bers. Fiber endoscopes are now widely used in clinical medicine,
and ber optical communication relies on the use of clad bers.
In 1961 Xerox announced the rst Xerox copier, which was based on an invention by Chester
Carlson in 1938. The basic idea was to use optical transfer to produce an electrostatic pattern or image
on a drum. This pattern then attracted black material (toner), which could be transferred to paper.
Other printing technology developments in the 1940s and 1950s included phototypesetting, inkjet
printers, and dye sublimation printing. A somewhat related area, photolithography of semiconductor
circuits, was initially developed by Andrus and Bond at Bell Labs [5,6]. This was based on techniques
used to make printed circuits. In one of its rst large-scale applications, the printed circuit had been used
during World War II for proximity fuses. The work of Andrus and Bond was quickly followed by
efforts at Texas Instruments and Fairchild to miniaturize silicon circuits, an effort that would lead to the
microelectronics revolution.
The most revolutionary invention in the century of optics, the laser, was rst realized just after this
period ended. Its precursor, the maser, came in the 1950s. Gordon, Zeiger, and Townes reported [7] the
operation of the ammonia maser in 1954; this was followed by the development of solid state masers
used in radio astronomy [8]. In 1958 Schawlow and Townes published a paper [9] describing the
physics of masers and lasers and a proposed method for making a laser. The next year a conference was
held at Shawanga Lodge in New York State, where further discussions were held concerning the
possible operation of the laser [10]. The race was on.
References
1. From Classical to Modern Chemistry: The Instrumental Revolution, P. J. T. Morris, ed. (Royal Society
of Chemistry, London, 2002).
2. B. I. Hirschowitz, Endoscopic examination of the stomach and duodenal cap with the berscope,
Lancet 1, 10741078 (1961).
3. L. E. Curtiss, B. I. Hirschowitz, and C. W. Peters, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 47, 117 (1957). Paper FC63 at the
OSA Annual Meeting.
4. H. H. Hopkins and N. S. Kapany, A exible berscope using static scanning, Nature 173, 3941
(1954).
5. J. Andrus, Fabrication of semiconductor devices, U.S. patent 3,122,817 (3 March 1964).
6. J. Andrus and W. L. Bond, Photoengraving in transistor fabrication, in F. J. Biondi et al., eds.,
Transistor Technology, Vol. III (D. Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1958), pp. 151162.
7. J. P. Gordon, H. J. Zeiger, and C. H. Townes, Molecular microwave oscillator and new hyperne
structure in the microwave spectrum of NH3, Phys. Rev. 95, 282 (1954).
8. J. A. Giordmaine, Centimeter wavelength radio astronomy including observations using the maser,
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 46, 267276 (1960).
9. A. L. Schawlow and C. H. Townes, Infrared and optical masers, Phys. Rev. 112, 1940 (1958).
10. Quantum Electronics, C. H. Townes, ed. (Columbia University, 1960). Shawanga Lodge Conference
Proceedings.
50
Introduction: Advances in Optical Science and Technology
19411959
Inventions and Innovations

of Edwin Land
Jeff Hecht
dwin Land was the Thomas Edison of twentieth-century optics, a prolic inventor and
entrepreneur. His milestone introduction of instant photography, at an Optical Society
spring meeting in New York on 21 February 1947, often overshadowed his other
contributions, ranging from 3D movies to surveillance satellites.
Lands rst transformative invention was the plastic sheet polarizer in 1928, when he was
not yet 20. Fascinated by polarization, he tried growing large sheets of iodoquinine sulfate, a
polarizing material invented in the nineteenth century. That did not work, but he found he could
make polarizing sheets by applying an electric or magnetic eld to align tiny crystals of the
material, then embedding them in a celluloid lm. Later he invented a process for making
polarizing sheets by stretching the plastic to align the polarizing crystals. Those plastic sheet
polarizers became the foundation of the Polaroid Corporation.
Land also invented a polarizing lter system that he hoped could solve a major highway
safety problemheadlights blinding other drivers at night. He proposed applying polarizers
aligned one way to headlights and orthogonal polarizers to windshields. Light scattered
from the environment would lose its polarization, so the windshield polarizer would transmit
it. But the polarized windshield would block light directly from the headlights, so only a
few percent would reach the drivers eyes. It sounded great, but the auto industry never
embraced it.
Instead, the polarized lm found other applications. In 1934, Eastman Kodak contracted to
buy it for photographic lters. Kodak was also interested in polarizing sunglasses, but Land got a
better deal from American Optical and in 1935 signed a contract to supply them with polarizing
lm bonded to glass for sunglasses.
Meanwhile, Land invented polarization-based stereoscopy for 3D movies. The rst generation of 3D movies projected overlapping images in two colors, which viewers watched through
glasses with red and green or red and blue lters. Land realized that glasses with a pair of
polarizers, one horizontal and the other vertical, could give the same effect for overlapping
images projected in horizontal and vertical polarization. A short polarized 3D lm at the
Chrysler Pavilion was a hit at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair. World War II interrupted 3D
movie development but created a need for stereoscopic surveillance imaging that was met by the
vectograph, a transparency-based process invented by Joseph Mahler and Land at Polaroid.
Polarized 3D movies returned after the war to produce a brief boom in the early 1950s, including
the rst color 3D lm, Bwana Devil.
A prescient question asked by Lands young daughter during a 1943 vacation launched his
quest for instant photography. Why couldnt she see the photo he had taken right away? Lands
logical mind realized it was a matter of chemistry, so he invented a self-developing lm that
combined exposure and processing of the negative and transfer to a positive. In early versions,
the photographer pulled a paper tab or leader after exposure, starting a series of events. Inside the
camera, a pair of rollers pressed the positive and negative sheets together and spread a processing
uid between them. This then emerged from the camera and, after a brief specied waiting time,
the photographer pulled the two sheets apart to display the image. Afterward, brushing a nal
coating across the image could preserve it.
51
The rst Polaroid cameras had input rolls of negative and positive monochromatic lm. Color
lm followed in the late 1950s. Polaroid introduced lm packs combining both types in the early
1960s, simplifying handling. Instant photography delighted amateurs, and also found many other
applicationsnotably, recording oscilloscope traces in research labs. Theodore Maimans notebook
recording the rst laser includes Polaroid prints of laser pulse traces.
Lands success lay in hiding the messy chemistry inside the lm package. The most rened version
was the SX-70 color lm introduced in 1972, in which each photo was a separate dry plastic package
ejected by the camera after exposure. The image area was pale green when ejected, then took on its nal
color over several minutes. It marked the pinnacle of Polaroids instant-photography success; a 1977
effort to introduce Polavision instant movies was a commercial failure.
Behind the scenes, Land was a pioneer in optical surveillance from aircraft and satellites. In 1952 he
served on a panel that recommended ying a spy plane at 70,000 feet over the Soviet Union to
photograph military facilities. He drew on that experience in 1954, when he was named to the steering
committee that proposed the U-2 spy plane, which performed exactly that mission, collecting the rst
reliable data on Soviet nuclear and missile activity. Land was among the scientists that President
Eisenhower assembled days after the 1957 Sputnik launch to discuss its implications. That led to Lands
involvement in the Corona series of photographic surveillance satellites, described elsewhere in this
book, which provided hard evidence that debunked the myth of a missile gap, a key step in stabilizing
Cold War tensions.
52
Inventions and Innovations of Edwin Land
19411959
Birth of Fiber-Optic Imaging and

Endoscopes
Jeff Hecht
iber-optic imaging had a surprisingly long prehistory before its birth as an important
optical technology in the 1950s. One fundamental building block, the concept of light
guiding by total internal reection, was already well over a century old. A second, the idea
of image transmission through arrays of light guides, went back decades. But it took the
invention of low-index cladding to successfully launch ber-optic imaging and endoscopes.
Swiss physicist and engineer Daniel Colladon was the rst to describe light guiding by total
internal reection in 1842 [1]. He demonstrated the effect by illuminating a water jet, an
experiment later repeated by John Tyndall. French physicist Jacques Babinet noted that light
guiding could also be seen in bent glass rods, but he gave no details. Light guiding in water jets
helped light up the luminous fountains of the great Victorian exhibitions in the late nineteenth
century, and by the early 1900s, glass and quartz light guides were illuminating microscope slides
and the mouths of dental patients [2].
The late nineteenth century also saw the rst interest in remote viewing, or what we now
call television. Henry C. Saint-Ren, who taught physics and chemistry at a small French
agriculture school, realized that one way to transmit an image was to project it onto one end of an
array of thin glass rods so it could be viewed at the other end of the bundle. He recognized that
light would mix within each rod, so the rods had to be tiny to give a good image. In 1895, he
wrote to the French Academy of Sciences: The whole array gives a complete illusion of the
object if the diameter of each point does not exceed 1/3 millimeter when the viewer is at a distance
of one meter from the image [3]. The idea was simple and elegant but probably was impractical
at the time, and no further records of his work have been found.
In 1926, a British pioneer of mechanical television re-invented the concept. John Logie Baird
led a patent on a method to produce an image without the use of a lens by assembling an array
of thin transparent tubes. His patent also covered using thin rods or tubes of glass, quartz, or
other transparent material [which] could be bent or curved, or in the case of very ne quartz bers,
could be exible [4]. He tried to transmit images through an array of 340 metal tubes of 0.1-in.
diameter and 2-in. length but abandoned it in favor of spinning disks for mechanical television.
At almost the same time, a young American radio engineer and inventor named C. W. Hansell
thought of a new way to read instrument dials that were out of sight. In a notebook entry dated 30
December 1926, he outlined his plans for using a exible bundle of glass bers. When his employer,
the Radio Corporation of America, applied for a patent, he expanded on his original idea,
proposing to use ber bundles in periscopes, endoscopes, and facsimile transmission. Crucially, he
realized that the bers on the two ends had to be aligned in the same pattern to transmit the image
properly. The patent issued in 1930 [5], but by then Hansell had moved on to other ideas.
The rst person to make an image-transmitting bundle was a medical student named
Heinrich Lamm at the University of Munich in Germany. Lamm had studied with Rudolf
Schindler, who had developed a semi-rigid gastroscope that could be bent up to 30 deg. Lamm
thought a bundle of glass bers would be much more exible and persuaded Schindler to buy him
some glass bers from the Rodenstock Optical Works in Munich.
Lamm combed the glass bers so they lined up from end to end of the bundle and projected
an image of a lamp lament onto one end. In 1930 he recorded an imperfect but recognizable
53
image on the other end (Fig. 1). It was

enough to prove the principle, although
Lamm conceded that the images were not
bright or sharp enough to be usable. He
tried to apply for a patent, but the German
Patent Ofce told him that a British version
of Hansells patent had just issued.
Lamm described his experiment, but
could go no further [6]. The world was
sinking into the Depression, and soon
Lamm had to ee Nazi Germany. World
War II followed. The concept of ber
image transmission did not reappear until
around 1950when three people developed it independently, two of them well
connected in optics and the third an independent inventor.
The postwar Dutch navy turned
to one of its leading optics specialists,
Abraham C. S. van Heel, to develop a new
type of periscope as it tried to rebuild its
submarine eet. The German optics industry was in ruins, and neither the United
States nor Britain wanted to share their
periscope technology with Holland. A
Fig. 1. Heinrich Lamm, M.D., combed thin glass bers and
professor at the Technical University of
packaged them in a short bundle (a), then focused the image
of a light bulb lament (b) onto one end. The bers were well
Delft, van Heel thought he could solve the
enough aligned to transmit a recognizable image of the lament
problem by guiding light through thin rods
(c) to the other end. Both laments are shown in negative images.
of glass or plastic. But his experiments with
(Courtesy of Michael Lamm, M.D.)
bare bers initially got nowhere because of
light leakage and scratching.
In neighboring Denmark, engineer and inventor Holger Mller Hansen, like Hansell, wanted to
peer into inaccessible places. He thought of using a exible ber bundle to transmit images after looking
at insects segmented eyes. An avid experimenter, he rst tried drawing his own bers, then bought
some bers to test. He also discovered that light leaked between bers if they touched but realized that
he could solve that problem if he clad the ber with a material having a lower refractive index.
However, when he sought a material with index close to one, the best candidate he could nd was
margarine, which did not work well.
Meanwhile, in 1951, British optical physicist Harold H. Hopkins found his inspiration at a dinner
party where a physician discussed the horrors of trying to use a rigid endoscope [7]. Hopkins decided
that a bundle of exible glass bers could do a better job and applied for a research grant to support a
research student. When the money came through, he assigned the project to a young student from India,
Narinder Kapany.
Hansells patent had been forgotten and expired in 1947. But the Danish Patent Ofce found it
after Mller Hansen led his own application in 1951, and rejected the ling. With no support and no
luck in nding a good cladding material, he gave up and turned to another invention. With more
support, van Heel and Hopkins persevered.
When van Heel sought help with his ber periscope design, the Dutch government referred him to
Brian OBrien, OSA president in 1951 and director of the University of Rochesters Institute of Optics.
The two knew each other as leaders in the parallel worlds of American and European optics; at the time,
van Heel headed the International Commission on Optics. As it happened, OBrien had already been
experimenting with light guiding, and he recommended cladding the outside of the ber with a lowerindex material, so no dirt or scratches spoiled the total reection, and light could not leak out if bers
54
Birth of ber-optic imaging and endoscopes
touched. He had gotten the idea from his studies of light guiding in retinal cells, which had earned him
OSAs Frederick Ives Medal in 1951 [8]. Van Heel quickly embraced the idea, and the two promised to
keep in touch after their October 1951 discussion.
When he returned to Delft, van Heel tried coating bers with beeswax and plastic. Both cladding
materials improved ber transmission, and the following year he sent light through a ber bundle half a
meter long, well beyond what Lamm had achieved. Then van Heel encountered another complication.
On a visit to Britain, fellow Dutch optical physicist Frits Zernike discovered that Hopkins and Kapany
were also making ber bundles. To establish his priority, van Heel quickly wrote a long article for the
Dutch-language weekly De Ingenieur and a short letter to the British weekly Nature. He also airmailed
a letter to OBrien, alerting him to the planned publications. The Dutch weekly published the paper in
its 12 June 1953 issue [9], but Nature uncharacteristically sat on the short letter for months. Neither
mentions OBrien, who evidently never replied to van Heels letter.
Why OBrien failed to reply is a mystery, and so is why Nature delayed publication of van Heels
letter until 2 January 1954 [10], when it appeared in the same issue as a longer paper that Hopkins and
Kapany had submitted in November [11].
OBrien was busy with other projects, including moving to head American Opticals new research
laboratory in Southbridge, Massachusetts, in 1953. He never published on clad bers, but he did apply
for a patent through American Opticals lawyers in November 1954. The patent ofce duly granted the
application [12], but it was overturned in court because of a blunder by the lawyers. With a year to le
the patent after publication of the De Ingenieur paper, they interpreted the date 12/6/53 marked on
OBriens copy as the American style with the month rst, rather than the European style with the date
rst, and missed the deadline.
In 1954, as today, Nature was one of the worlds best-read research journals, so the two papers
collectively put ber optics into the public eye. Yet neither Hopkins nor van Heel could secure funding
for further development.
Things were different in America. A young South African gastroenterologist working at the
University of Michigan named Basil Hirschowitz was excited by the idea of making a exible ber-optic
endoscope. The Central Intelligence Agency picked up on an idea mentioned in van Heels paperthat
ber bundles might make unbreakable image scramblers. And Kapany landed a research post at
Rochester.
At Michigan, Hirschowitz teamed with his supervisor Marvin Pollard and optics professor
C. Wilbur Pete Peters on the project in mid-1955. They hired Lawrence E. Curtiss, a physics
student interested in medical instruments, to do the leg work. Hirschowitz did not know that Curtiss
was just starting his sophomore year.
Curtiss ran into problems when he tested bare bers that Hirschowitz had bought. Cleaning the
bers improved their light transmission, but every time he touched the ber, transmission dropped
about ve percent. The mysterious loss came from ngerprint oils, which dry to leave a residue with a
refractive index of 1.5, close enough to the glass index to spoil total internal reection. Drawing their
own bers from glass rods with refractive index of 1.69 overcame that problem, but the bundled bers
scratched each other, again increasing losses.
Peters suggested applying a plastic or lacquer cladding, but that reduced light transmission. Curtiss
suggested threading a high-index rod through a low-index tube and drawing the two into a clad ber,
but the older physicists said it would never work. For a few months he heeded their advice, and he and
Peters made a three-foot-long bundle, which they described at an OSA meeting in Lake Placid, New
York, in October 1956. But Curtiss still thought rod-in-tube bers would work better. When Peters was
away at a conference on 8 December 1956, Curtiss bought some tubes of soft glass from the chemistry
supply ofce, put rods in them, and drew the clearest glass bers that had yet been made.
Curtiss had been lucky. Drawing good rod-in-tube bers requires very clean rod surfaces, and they
had happened to buy re-polished rods. Nonetheless, they had a breakthrough, and the project went
into overdrive. Hirschowitz wasted no time applying for a patent, and by February the group had
assembled the rst ber-optic endoscope.
Meanwhile, the CIA pressed American Optical to develop ber-optic image scramblers for
encoding and decoding secret documents. When OBrien did not get the project going quickly enough,
55
the CIA hired Will Hicks, a young physicist from Greenville, South Carolina, and sent him to build
image scramblers for American Optical. Like the Michigan group, he tested plastic and glass cladding,
but he took a different course and developed rigid bundles of fused bers suitable for image scramblers.
Image scramblers turned out to have a fatal awthey always scrambled images in the same way,
so an enemy who intercepted enough of the scrambled images could eventually work out the key. Hicks
was the rst to spot the aw, but through a friend he also came up with a new use for the fused ber
bundle technology, as ber optic faceplates to guide light between stages of an image intensier.
Rigid or fused ber bundles opened technological possibilities that were different from those of exible
bundles. Melting bundles of bers together and stretching them made the light-guiding cores of the bers
thinner than the cores of isolated bers, and groups of fused bers could be stacked together and drawn
again, to make them even thinner. Hicks noticed that fused bundles with the nest bers showed odd
colored patterns on their cut and polished ends. American Optical managers showed the odd pattern to
Elias Snitzer when he interviewed for a job, and Snitzer recognized them as mode patterns, produced
because the bers had been drawn so thin that their cores were transmitting only a single optical mode.
Snitzer got the job and became the rst to describe single-mode transmission in an optical ber [13]. Singlemode bers would eventually become the backbone of the global ber optic communications network.
Kapany took a different course at Rochester, writing a series of papers outlining the principles of
ber optics. First published in Journal of the Optical Society of America, they became the core of the
elds rst textbook. The 46 papers he published through 1966 accounted for 30% of the elds entire
literature during the period, including reports on medical treatment.
Hirschowitz and Curtiss helped American Cystoscope Makers develop the rst ber optic
endoscope in 1960. It quickly replaced earlier semi-rigid endoscopes because it was far more exible
and much safer to use, and it greatly expanded the use of endoscopy. American Optical and a spinoff
company formed by Hicks in 1958, Mosaic Fabrications, developed fused ber bundles into military
and commercial products. Fused and exible bers soon found a range of applications, from reading
punched computer cards and inspecting the innards of NASAs massive Saturn V rockets to decorative
lamps. But none of them were transparent enough for communications.
Note: This essay based on material from [14].
References and Notes

1. D. Colladon, On the reections of a ray of light inside a parabolic liquid stream, Comptes Rendus 15,
800802 (1842). (Translated by Julian A. Carey).
2. S. B. Leiter, Microscope illumination by means of quartz rod, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 11, 187189 (1925).
3. K. Weedon, unpublished manuscript based on extended unpublished version of H. C. Saint-Ren, On a
solution to the problem of remote viewing, Comptes Rendus 150, 446447 (1910).
4. J. L. Baird, An improved method of and means for producing optical images, British patent
application 285,738; 15 October 1926. (Issued 15 February 1928.)
5. C. W. Hansell, Picture transmission, U.S. patent 1,751,584; 25 March 1930. (Filed 13 August 1927.)
6. H. Lamm, Biegsame optische Gerte, Z. Instrumentenkunde 50, 579581 (1930). (Flexible optical
instruments, translated by Lamm many years later.)
7. Hopkins credits Hugh Gainsborough of St. Georges Hospital in London: H. H. Hopkins, letter to the
editor of Photonics Spectra, dated 26 August 1982. (Unedited version supplied by W. L. Hyde; edited
version appeared in November 1982 Photonics Spectra).
8. B. OBrien, Frederic Ives Medalist for 1951, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 41, 879881 (1951).
9. A. C. S. van Heel, Optische afbeelding zonder lenzen of abfeeldingsspielgels, De Ingenieur (12 June
1953).
10. A. C. S. van Heel, A new method of transporting optical images without aberrations, Nature 173, 39
(1954).
11. H. H. Hopkins and N. S. Kapany, A exible berscope using static scanning, Nature 173, 3941
(1954).
12. B. OBrien, Optical image forming devices, U.S. patent 2,825,260 (4 March 1958).
13. E. Snitzer, Cylindrical dielectric waveguide modes, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 51, 491498 (1961).
14. J. Hecht, City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics (Oxford, 1999).
56
19411959
Xerography: an Invention That

Became a Dominant Design
Mark B. Myers
Introduction
Xerography, or electrophotography, was one of the great inventions of the twentieth century.
It was invented in 1938, 78 years ago, and remains in wide use today. The copier has become
a common presence in our workplace, and its availability is assumed. Prior to its invention an
ofce worker would type an original with sheets of carbon paper and copy paper sandwiched
behind it in the typewriter carriage. Legibility limited the number of copies that could be
made. If more copies were required, the typing process would be repeated or a master would
be typed and offset printing would be employed. The xerographic copier radically changed
all of that work and created a whole new communication chain between ofce workers
and their organizations with the multiple copies of a copy sharing the remarks of the
respondents.
Xerographys creation and application closely parallels the 100-year history of The Optical
Society. It was invented as a novel imaging system, which had no existing competitors. One of its
rst public demonstrations was at The Optical Societys Annual Meeting held in Detroit,
Michigan, on 22 October 1948 [1,2]. Although seen as highly novel, the observers could not
see the future value of the technology. That was not unusual: the leading industrial laboratories
of the time had previously been offered the opportunity for the development and commercialization of the technology, but all had declined [3].
It would be 1959, owing to the combined efforts of Battelle Memorial Institute and the small
company Haloid that would become the Xerox Corporation, when the Xerox 914 copier made
its phenomenal market introduction. It would take the efforts of the inventor Chester Carlson,
the Battelle Memorial Institute, and Xerox people over a period of 21 years to reach this 914
successand what a success it was! It is estimated that in 1955 before the introduction of the 914
about 20 million copies per year were made worldwide, largely by typing carbons. In 1964, ve
years after the introduction of the xerographic copier, 9.5 billion copies per year were made, and
in 1985 the number had grown to 550 billion [4]. The revenues of the small Haloid-Xerox
Corporation based on the 914 and the follow on products would grow at a 44% rate
compounded annually for the decade 1960 to 1970 to be greater than $1.5 billion. It was the
fastest sustained corporate growth rate in history up to that time.
When invited to write this brief chapter on the history of the invention of xerography, the
author was confronted with the question of what more can be usefully said that has not been
previously written. Two comprehensive books were published on the subject in 1965 by the key
early participants, namely, Xerography and Related Processes by John Dessauer and Harold
Clark [5] and Electrophotography by Roland Schaffert [6]. There are at least four other texts
[710] written by practitioners over the period 1984 to 1998 as well as numerous scientic
papers and popular press reviews in the same period written by scientists who researched the key
processes during the further development of the technology. The value the author brings is that of
an early participant in the decade following the introduction of the 914. These are the
observations of a young scientist joining Xerox in 1964 to work with the individuals from
Xerox and Battelle who created that rst product success.
57
Fig. 1
Six-step process.
The Invention
Xerography is a photoelectric imaging process that creates high-delity copies. It is distinguished for its
ability to image directly onto plain paper without the use of wet chemical agents, which were common
to silver halide and other sensitized paper photography. How xerography works is demonstrated in the
following six-step process (see Fig. 1.):
1. An insulator photoconductive sheet attached to an electrode substrate is uniformly electrostatically
charged.
2. The photoconductive sheet is imagewise exposed with light. The electrical conductivity of the
photoconductors exposed areas is greatly increased and the surface charges are discharged through
the photoreceptor, leaving a latent electrostatic image on the unexposed areas.
3. Pigmented polymer particles charged to the opposite polarity of the latent image are cascaded
over the surface. The pigmented particles are electrostatically attracted and tacked to the
charged image area, whereas the particles do not stick to the uncharged areas. The latent image
is now visible.
4. Plain paper is placed on top of the powder image, and a charge is applied to its back surface with
sufcient voltage to de-tack and transfer the image to the plain paper.
5. The plain paper is stripped away from the photoreceptor surface with the image.
6. The polymer toner image on the paper is fused by heat. The photoreceptor surface is cleaned and
readied for the next imaging.
This six-step process is the formulation of the basic Chester Carlson 1938 invention as led in
his patent application of 4 April 1939 and which was issued in 1942 [11]. The process has been so
robust over time that it still is the core design of all xerographic copiers and printers produced, 77
years later.
The rst commercial implementation of this process was the Xerox Model A processor introduced
in 1949 (Fig. 2). It was a totally manual operation where the operator carried out each of the above
process steps. As a new Xerox employee, the author was introduced to xerography with this machine by
working through all of the steps described above. The experience was reminiscent of an introductory
physics lab, interesting to the technically trained but bothersome for ofce workers.
The time between these products, 1949 to 1959, required intensive improvements by the Battelle
and Xerox teams in both process physics and materials. The major new challenge to realizing the
potential of this technology was the automation of the process steps requiring their systems integration
58
and the creation of a manufacturing

capability for these new machines. The
operating advances by the engineers were
remarkable. The 1949 Model A could
produce one copy every four minutes in
the hands of a skilled operator. The 914
would produce seven copies per minute
with a press of the green button in
1959 (see Fig. 3). In 1968, the Xerox
3600 would produce copies at 60 pages
per minute, or one every second. The automated xerographic six-step process is
shown in Fig. 4.
The Inventor
Chester Carlson by every measure is the
model for the aspirations of all independent inventors: he created a great invention that had tremendous societal benets
as well as providing him with great personal wealth. He is the individual inventors dream.
His story is compelling. He grew up
as an only child in a family of very limited
resources. In his early years he became the
Fig. 2. Xerox Model A, 1949. (Courtesy of Xerox
Corporation.)
sole provider for his parents. Living in a
suburb of Los Angeles, he worked his way
through two years at the Riverside Junior
College, from which he transferred to
California Institute of Technology for his
nal two years and graduated with a
degree in physics. He started his career
in Bell Labs in New York, but was laid off
during the depression. He became a patent attorney after attending the New York
University law school. It was his work as
an attorney that drove his sense of purpose to nd a solution to the need for
copies.
Chester Carlson rst led a patent
application for his invention in October
1937 and reduced it to practice in October
1938 reproducing the image 102238
ASTORIA. At this time he had funded an
Fig. 3. Xerox 914, 1959. (Courtesy of Xerox Corporation.)
assistant, Otto Kornei, to help with the
laboratory work. This experimental process was his basis for working out the basic six-step process that was the core of his invention. The
photoconductor they employed was amorphous sulfur, and they developed the image with dyed
lycopodium powder. Charging was done by rubbing a cloth imparting a triboelectric charge on the
sulfur lm and shaking the powder in a container to impart a triboelectric charge of the opposite sign.
The developed image was fused by heat from a Bunsen burner.
59
Fig. 4. The automated

xerographic process using the
six-step process. In brief, the
original is scanned and
projected synchronously onto a
charged rotating photoreceptor
drum. A toner development
station develops the image on
the photoreceptor and the copy
paper is fed to transfer the
image from the photoreceptor.
The image is detached from the
photoreceptor and then passed
through toner fuser rolls.
Chester Carlson would contact over 20 companies to try to establish interest in his invention over
the period of 1938 to 1944, with no success. In 1944 he had the opportunity to describe the invention to
Russell Dayton of the Battelle Memorial Institute. Dayton was visiting Carlson seeking counsel on an
unrelated patent matter and became interested in the idea. Battelle and a yet to emerge small company,
Haloid, would transform his ideas into a phenomenal success.
Working with both of these organizations, Carlson would relocate to Rochester, New York, and
make the Haloid (to become Xerox) labs his professional home. He would maintain an ofce there
through the 1960s. His original xerographic patent would expire in 1955 just before the introduction of
the 914. He actively protected his and Xeroxs interests by ling over 20 additional xerographic patents,
with the nal one granted in 1965. The author recalls his presence in the labs. He was a highly honored
gure for the new and growing research staff. He was very shy, so few knew him well personally. When
he was seen walking the hallways, on second glance he would be gone, a ghostlike gure.
Chester Carlsons wealth from his invention would reach $150 million. At the time of his passing in
1968, that amount would be worth over $1 billion in todays money. He spent the nal period of his life
giving away his wealth to causes that supported peace and social justice.
Battelle Memorial Institute

Carlson was invited to come to Columbus, Ohio, to demonstrate the concept to members of Battelles
management and research staff, and although the invention was in a very early state, they were interested.
A working agreement was concluded in 1944 for Battelle to undertake the development of xerography for
a license on future revenues. The Battelle researchers undertook the investigation and selection of the key
technology components of the six-step process to enable the system to work. Key advances were the use of
amorphous selenium as the photoreceptor, the design of corotrons for the charging processes, and the
invention of the two-component development and fusing systems to x the image.
Battelle was innovative both in their research and in their willingness to break their own business
model. They were a contract research organization to which clients brought their problems and
purchased the necessary research and development. Battelle did not fund research on ideas from outside
inventors, but they changed this in the case of Carlson and xerography. In a sense they were modeling a
role that venture capitalist investors would play much later. They would address the challenge of getting
to market by forming a partnership with Haloid in 1947. The rights that had been acquired from
Carlson would be sold to Haloid for an equity position in the growth of the business. Battelle
60
additionally gave exclusive rights to the

xerographic patents that they had been
granted from their development efforts. At
the conclusion of the Battelle and Xerox
relationship in 1970, Battelle had increased the wealth of their endowment
manyfold.
The Haloid Company

(to Become Xerox)
In 1944, John Dessauer, the head of Haloid
research, and Joseph C. Wilson, who would
soon assume the Haloid presidency, were
looking for new directions for the company. Dessauer came upon an article describ Fig. 5. Dr. John Dessauer, Haloid head of research to the left,
Chester Carlson, and Joseph C. Wilson, president of Haloid,
ing electrophotography in the July 1944
examining a xerographic printer prototype in the late 1940s.
addition of the Radio News. He shared the
(Courtesy of Xerox Corporation.)
article with Wilson, and they agreed that a
closer look was warranted.
Haloid was a small Rochester, New York, company formed 1906 by a group of individuals who
had left Eastman Kodak (see Fig. 5). For many years they had a small but successful business producing
high-quality specialty silver halide photographic paper. They operated in the shadow of the much larger
Kodak Company, which limited their growth potential in photographic paper. In time, other
competitors eroded the competitive advantage of their specialty product. The future of Haloid was
in doubt, and they needed a new vision and marketplace.
John Dessauer and Joseph C. Wilson, the soon-to-be president of Haloid, visited Battelle in Columbus,
Ohio, in December 1945 to see the technology demonstrated. They approached Battelle early in 1946 to
request an exclusive license to the technology and to propose a joint development program. Battelle most
probably would have preferred a more promising partner, but they, like Chester Carlson, had not found
any company interested. An agreement was reached to take effect 1 January 1947.
Joseph C. Wilson was the head of Haloid and Xerox in the period 1946 to 1967. He was from a
wealthy Rochester family and was the third in the line of Wilsons to be the head of Haloid. He
graduated from the University of Rochester, where he studied literature, and received an MBA degree
from the Harvard Business School. He was an exceptionally eloquent business speaker. He loved
poetry, and many of his speeches would either begin or end with a poem by Robert Frost.
He also was a man who was willing to take actions that had large risks. The Haloid Company
represented most of his familys wealth. He invested $12.5 million in the 914-product development,
which amounted to all of the companys prots for a decade, and he borrowed more. If the 914 had
failed, the company would have gone under. After the great success of the 914 he would speak of one of
the few disappointments. He spoke of friends who had offered to invest money for the development and
how they would later be unhappy with him because he declined their offer as he felt that the risk of
failure was too great. He is honored at the Harvard Business School by named chair, the Joseph C.
Wilson Professor of Entrepreneurship.
John Dessauer was a chemical engineer, educated in Germany, who had immigrated to the United
States in the 1930s as a result of the social upheavals that were taking place in his native country. He
joined the Haloid Company in 1935 as part of an acquisition that the company had made. He became
the rst director of research for Haloid, and it was his insight that brought Chester Carlson, Battelle,
and Xerox together.
John Dessauer would make another important contribution to xerography. Over the period 1960
to 1970, he would start the building of a Xerox research organization in Webster, New York, dedicated
61
to evolving the company from the dependence on a core xerographic technology based on speculative
invention to a predictive science base. The Xerox scientists and engineers would be challenged by the
lack of relevant information to support increasingly sophisticated applications of the technology. The
underlying sciences of triboelectricity, photo-generation, and charge transport in wide-bandgap
semiconductors, controlled corona discharge in ambient atmospheres, physics of surface charge states,
and the thermal ow characteristics of pigmented polymers were not widely practiced in the external
scientic research of that time.
John Dessauer showed a personal interest in the new research recruits joining the organization. He
would drop into the individual scientists labs to establish connection through wide-ranging conversations. Dessauer developed a close consultative relationship to guide his organization building effort
with John Bardeen, Nobel Laureate, of the University of Illinois, who served as an advisor and who
would become a member of the Xerox board of directors from 1961 to 1974.
The research capability would continue to grow under the leadership of Jack Goldman, George
Pake, and William Spencer with the establishment of Xerox PARC and Xerox Research Center of
Canada. From 1981 to 1991, the work of the three centers would rank Xerox among the ten most
inuential academic and industrial research institutions in the United States as measured by reference to
their scientic papers [12].
Xerography, a Dominant Design

Xerography has shown the characteristics of a dominant design [13]. Early in its history it established
a competitive edge with respect to alternative technologies, thus becoming the customer and industry
choice. Many competitive rms became committed to its usage, offering improved versions. Finally,
the technology has shown the capacity to grow in capability and not hit limits leading to early
obsolescence.
This does not mean xerography did not have serious competition from alternative technologies.
Many organizations including Xerox invested in copying and printing technologies that if successful
could have become replacements. They included drop-on-demand inkjet, continuous-stream ink jet,
photoactive pigment electrography, and ionography. They all had merits, but only the drop-on-demand
inkjet had major market impact. In the drop-on-demand inkjet case, it was a new market for color
digital photography home printing that drove the demand. It was a market in which xerography would
not be competitive.
A number of market and technological factors have greatly extended the useful life of xerography.
The following key events are suggested:
There was a benet to the expansion of xerography by offerings of new competition. Xerox
established through its relationship to Carlson, Battelle, and its own investments a patent position
that limited competitive offerings. This patent exclusion was set aside in 1974 by a consent decree
agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. It required that Xerox license to all competitors
its xerographic patents for period of ten years and any new patents issued in that interval. This
created an explosion of competitive offerings particularly from Japan.
An important advance in 1969 was the invention of computer-driven laser writing onto a
xerographic photoreceptor [14]. This opened a new market for xerography in electronic imaging
and printing. Xerox introduced the 9700 in 1977, which printed single-sheet, 300-spi (samples
per inch), single-sheet images at 120 pages per minute. Hewlett Packard introduced desktop laser
300-spi printing in 1984 working at eight pages per minute. Both products revolutionized their
respective market places. Most importantly, the application of xerography was transformed from its
analog imaging role to become part of the emerging digital imaging future.
Canon introduced the concept of a low-cost personal copier with a customer-replaceable
consumable cartridge in 1982. They creatively collected all of the high-maintenance elements of
the xerographic processes into a customer-replaceable unit, thereby removing the need for frequent
62
service. This would open a new market, and desktop copying and printing and would become a
design standard for the industry.
Organic photoreceptors [15,16] offered a breakthrough to a cost barrier, as they could be

coated with much-lower-cost manufacturing, and they could be made into highly exible belts
rather than the selenium alloys, thus offering new printer architectures for digital color. In 1975,
Kodak introduced its Ektaprint 100 copier/duplication based on an organic photoreceptor.
Xerox followed suit in 1982 with its active-matrix organic photoreceptor in its 10-Series 1075
and 1090 duplicators.
Canon, Hewlett Packard, Fuji-Xerox, and Xerox introduced very-high-quality digital color
reprographic and printing devices that extended xerography into the color printing and
graphics marketplace.
The Total Quality Movement practiced by Japan manufacturers greatly improved the
reliability of xerographic machine designs. Xerox improved its design and manufacture through
its learning from Fuji-Xerox.
It is the nature of dominant designs that they are not simply replaced by an alternative technology.
Their dominance will end with a radical transformation of the market they serve. A current example of
the decline of a dominant design is analog silver halide photography and its iconic Kodak yellow box.
The magic was in the chemistry of the lm and its later processing. The analog lm businesses of Kodak
rapidly declined with the ascendency of a whole new paradigm of consumer photography: the digital
camera, the smart phone, and inkjet printers. Dominant designs do have lifetimes.
Similar changes are appearing for prints on paper. The internet, personal computing devices, and
social media are reshaping the world of publishing newspapers, magazines, and books. Challenges to
the future use of print are seen in the processes of banking, legal, and other businesses.
Xerography is clearly in the mature stages of its lifetime. There still remain active literature creation
and patent issuance every year, and there are at least a dozen companies producing products and
services. Whether xerography prospers or fades into the sunset will depend on innovation extending its
application into new markets.
References
1. OSA Annual Meeting, Detroit, Michigan, 22 October 1948.
2. R. M. Schaffert and C. D. Oughton, Xerography: a new principle of photography and graphic
reproduction, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 38, 991998 (1948).
3. J. H. Dessauer, My Years at Xerox, The Billions Nobody Wanted (Manor, 1975), p 31.
4. D. Owen, Making Copies: at rst, nobody bought Chester Carsons strange idea, but trillions of
documents later, his invention is the biggest thing in printing since Gutenberg, Smithsonian Mag.,
August 2004.
5. J. H. Dessauer and C. H. Clark, Xerography and Related Processes (The Focal Press, 1965).
6. R. Schaffert, Electrophotography (The Focal Press, 1965).
7. M. Scharfe, Electrophotography Principles and Optimization (Research Studies Press, 1984), Vol. 3.
8. J. Mort, The Anatomy of Xerography, Its Invention and Evolution (McFarland, 1989).
9. L. B. Schein, Electrophotography and Development Physics (Springer, 1992).
10. P. Borsenberger, Organic Photoreceptors for Xerography (Marcel Dekker, 1998).
11. C. Carlson, Electrophotography, U.S. patent 2,297,691 (6 October 1942).
12. E. Gareld, Citation index for scientic information, Science Watch 4(2), 8 (1993).
13. J. M. Utterback, Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation (Harvard Business Press, 1996), pp. 2326.
14. J. C. Urbach, T. S. Fisli, and G. K. Starkweather, Laser scanning for electronic printing, Proc. IEEE 70,
597618 (1982).
15. M. Stolka, D. M. Pai, and J. E. Yanus, Imaging system with a diamine charge transport material in a
polycarbonate resin, U.S. patent 4,265,990 (5 May 1981).
16. M. Smith, M., C. F. Hackett, and R. W. Radler, Overcoating the photoconductive layer with a charge
transfer compound of aromatic polynuclear structure; xerograph, U.S. patent 4, 282, 298 (4 August 1981).
63
19411959
U.S. Peacetime Strategic

Reconnaissance Cameras,
19541974: Legacy of James
G. Baker and the U-2
Kevin Thompson
ames G. Baker contributed to optics, optical design, and, as this chapter describes, was a
pivotal player during the development and deployment of the U-2, and the optics of the U-2.
To briey mention some of his contributions outside of the U-2 is itself a challenge. He
graduated from Harvard in 1942 with a Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics, advised by
leading astronomer Harold Shapely, and went on to make innovative contributions for nearly 70
years including developing ray tracing and optical design code using the second largest computer
ever built (the rst one was delivered to Richard Feynman for the Manhattan Project). He not
only designed large format cameras for reconnaissance but also fabricated and tested the
large aspheric components personally. He is perhaps best known in the public for his design
of the BakerNunn tracking cameras and for designing and supporting the fabrication of
the rst freeform surface in mass production as part of the Polaroid SX70 camera, to name a
few examples.
This chapter features his work not only as the optical designer for the optics for the U-2, but
also his lesser known contributions as a leading member of the group that convinced then
President Eisenhower to authorize the U-2 program. The sources for this chapter were selected to
be as original as possible, and are dominantly CIA reports that were developed by the CIA
History Staff in the 1980s and released as classied reports within the CIA. These were later
declassied with redactions when the existence of the National Reconnaissance Ofce (NRO)
became known to the public in the late 1990s. All of the material in this chapter comes from
Bakers personal les that were made available to the author by the Baker family.
Bakers involvement in reconnaissance cameras began in 1941, when he was invited by
Major George Goddard to spend two months at the Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio [1]. Perhaps
the most succinct introduction to Bakers role in the U-2 and related programs is from an NRO
press release that announced the rst Pioneers of National Reconnaissance on 18 August
2000. The release states: James G. Baker, Ph.D.A Harvard astronomer, Dr. James Baker
designed most of the lenses and many of the cameras used in aerial over-ights of denied
territory, enabling the success of the U.S. peacetime strategic reconnaissance policy [2].
To write only on his technical accomplishments for reconnaissance cameras would overlook
a key role Baker played in bringing President Eisenhower to authorize the U-2 to carry the
camera. The rst section of the chapter will highlight Bakers roles in that arearoles that often
consisted of leading key technology committees, which led to the authorization of the U-2
program specically as described in [3]. In the context of the U-2 program, these roles began in
1951 with the establishment of what came to be called the BEACON HILL Study Group, named
for the location of the study group headquarters on Beacon Hill, in Boston. The group was made
up of chairman Carl Overage, a physicist at Kodak, Baker, Edward Purcell from Harvard, and a
total of 12 others that included Edwin Land of Polaroid, Richard Perkin of Perkin-Elmer, and
64
signicantly, Lt. Richard Leghorn from the Wright Air Development Command, who later became the
founder of ITEK where the CORONA program was developed in later years. This group
toured airbases, laboratories, and companies every weekend for two months in January and February
of 1952. From there the members invested three months preparing a classied document they presented
on 15 June 1952the BEACON HILL Report. The report, with 14 chapters, discussed various
technologies from radio to photography including infrared and microwave reconnaissance
systems. One of the key recommendations from the report was the need to develop high-altitude
reconnaissance.
Reaction to the BEACON HILL Report came a year later, in the summer of 1953, after Dwight D.
Eisenhower became president. The specic timing of the presidents interest was driven by an early report
of a new Soviet intercontinental bomber, designated Bison by NATO. This was a B-52 class bomber
(the B-52 was just entering production in the U.S.). This report was validated at the Moscow May Day air
show. In July of 1953, the Intelligence Systems Panel (ISP) was established, chaired by Baker, to advise
both the Air Force and the CIA on ways to implement the construction of high-ying aircraft and highacuity cameras. In parallel, during World War II (WWII), Baker had established a full-scale optical
laboratory, the Harvard University Optical Research Laboratory. After the war, Harvard asked that the
laboratory end its relationship with the university and it was moved to Boston University to become the
Boston University Optical Research Laboratory (BUORL), with the move funded by the Air Force. Baker,
however, elected to stay at Harvard where he continued to design lenses for use in photoreconnaissance.
BUORL was destined to become ITEK in 1957 under the leadership of Richard Leghorn.
At the rst meeting of the ISP on 3 August 1953 the discussion centered on the fact that the best
intelligence on the interior of the Soviet Union was based on German aerial photos taken near the end
of WWII. Discussions continued to review incremental modications that either were being attempted
or planned to create a high-altitude airframe from existing production aircraft. At the third ISP
meeting on 2425 May 1954, a critical outcome was to establish that to be successful, a high-altitude
aircraft would need to y above 70,000 feet, something that could not be achieved with modications
to existing airframes. The other pivotal event at this meeting was that the panel learned of a
lightweight, high-ying aircraft that was being developed at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. Baker
dispatched a member of the panel to learn more about the project. The plane was conceived by the
now legendary Kelly Johnson, leader of the Skunk Works, who had designed essentially a single
engine jet powered glider, which was called at the time the Lockheed CL-282. On 24 September 1954
Baker convened the ISP panel to discuss the new airplane. The panel moved to support the CL-282,
but the Air Force, which had been aware of the CL-282, had already made a decision not to fund the
development of the aircraft.
Somewhat independently, on 26 July 1954, President Eisenhower commissioned another panel of
experts, led this time by James Killian, then the president of MIT. This panel had 42 of the nations
leading scientists, including Baker, segmented into three project groups. This group met 307 times over
nine months and included eld trips and conferences. Baker was a member of the Project 3 committee,
which was led by Edwin (Din) Land of Polaroid. Land believed the optimal committee size was one that
could t into a taxi and, as a result, this was a small group consisting of Baker and only a few others,
including notably mathematician John W. Tukey. In mid-August 1954, Land and Baker went to
Washington where Land was shown the details of the CL-282, after which he is quoted as having
phoned Baker to say, Jim, I think we have the plane you are after. Following a somewhat convoluted
path that was dominantly political and too lengthy to describe here, Land and Killian met directly with
President Eisenhower in November 1954 and the president directed that CL-282 be developed by the
CIA. Even with the presidents support, the competitive situation was complicated, but a key deciding
factor in the end was that Kelly Johnson promised to deliver the plane in eight months for $22 million,
which he did, under budget. A nal contract was signed on 2 March 1955 with Lockheed to deliver 20
planes between July 1955 and November 1956. To give some perspective on the priority of the project,
Richard Bissell of the CIA wrote a check to prestart the work and mailed it to Kelly Johnson.
With this background on how the U-2 airframe, a version of which is shown in Fig. 1 [3], came to
be authorized, this section will present Bakers work on some of the lenses that were considered or used
on cameras that ew on the U-2. This material is based on [4] and from the article written by Baker [5].
U.S. peacetime strategic reconnaissance cameras, 19541974: Legacy of James G. Baker and the U-2
65
Fig. 1. U-2R (World Air

Power Journal, Vol. 28, Spring
1997 published by AIRtime
Publishing, 10 Bay Street,
Westport, Conn. 06880).
To frame the challenge, the dominant aerial cameras that were used in WWII were the Fairchild
K-19 and K-21 framing cameras with focal lengths from 24 to 40 inches. In the period that the U-2 was
authorized, a typical ground resolution was 78 meters when ying at 10,000 meters. For the U-2, due
to the new objects of interest, there was a need for 3-meter ground resolution from >20,000 meters, or a
4 improvement. In the mid-1940s, Baker, working with Richard Perkin of Perkin-Elmer, had
developed a 48-inch focal length scanning camera that was installed in a B-36 that resolved two
white softballs on a green from 10,000 meters. However, this camera weighed more than a ton and the
weight budget for the U-2 was near half of this.
Baker began work on a radical new camera in October 1954, but quickly realized that it would
take more than a year to design, even with his computer access, whereas the plane needed a camera well
before this. Consulting with Richard Perkin, the decision was made to base the improved camera on the
Hycon K-38. This camera, with weight reduction implemented by Perkin-Elmer and improved optical
design developed by Baker in a few weeks, became the A-1 camera working at f/8 that was used in the
rst ights in mid-1955. A high-impact innovation at this stage was that instead of ying three cameras,
one down-looking and two oblique, Rod Scott of Perkin-Elmer developed a rocking mount to gather
the oblique and down-looking images with one camera.
As soon as there was a plan set for a camera to support the early U-2s, Baker began work on a
totally new concept, the B-camera. This was a 36-inch focal length f/10 lens with aspheric surfaces,
personally polished and tested by Baker. The use of aspheric lenses was essentially unheard of in this era
and is one of the reasons Bakers lenses set a new standard for high-acuity cameras. Developed in
Fig. 2. (a) Layout of a proposed Camera-C (this version at f/11), (b) an assembled Camera-C, 240 EFL, with a
nal conguration at f/12.
66
collaboration with Rod Scott of Perkin-Elmer, the B-camera used only one panoramic imaging lens with
18 18 inch format frames. This lens, and variations on it, became a key component of all cameras
throughout the U-2 program.
Independently, Bakers concept for the ultimate U-2 camera, called the C-camera (see Fig. 2 [6]),
was a 240-inch focal length lens to be operated at f/20. However, in conversation with Kelly Johnson he
realized this format would never be small enough or light enough for the U-2. Eventually he developed a
180-inch focal length lens operating at f/13.85. While this design would typically have taken years to
complete in that era, his state-of-the-art computer allowed it to be completed in 16 days. However, in a
test ight of the Hycon manufactured lens, the conclusion was that the 5 longer focal length made the
lenses too sensitive to vibration. Apparently this result was never relayed to Baker, who learned of it
years later. When he learned of the source of the decision to not use the C-camera, he wrote a terse letter
stating he had solved that, should they have bothered to ask.
References
1. The New England Section of OSA, Highlighting past projects and camera systems in aerial
photography, 23 October 1997, from J. G. Baker personal les.
2. Press release from the NRO, 18 August 2000, from J. G. Baker personal les.
3. From U-2 The Second Generation, a reprint from World Air Power Journal (AIRtime Publishing, Spring
1997), Vol. 28, from J. G. Baker personal les.
4. G. W. Pedlow and D. E. Welzenbach, The CIA and the U-2 Program, 19541974 (Center for the Study
of Intelligence, 1998), pp. 1766.
5. J. G. Baker, The U-2 B-camera, its creation and technical capabilities, Proceedings of the U-2
Development Panel, The U-2 History Symposium, held at the National Defense University, 17
September 1998.
6. Photo from J. G. Baker personal les.
7. Personal correspondence between Bill McFadden (formerly of HYCON), and R. Cargill Hall, Air Force
History Support Ofce, on 10 September 1997, from J. G. Baker personal les.
8. R. Cargill Hall, The Eisenhower administration and the cold war: framing American astronautics to
serve national security, draft manuscript, 10 January 1994, from J. G. Baker personal les.
9. Personal correspondence between J. Baker and R. Cargill Hall, comments on the draft manuscript, 13
December 1993, from J. G. Baker personal les.
67
19411959
History of Optical Coatings and OSA

before 1960
Angus Macleod
Introduction
The full history of any scientic subject is impossibly complex, and any account can only be a
simplied one. Like other technologies, optical coatings developed over a broad front in many
countries with many workers and over a long time. Some discoveries were made and then
forgotten and rediscovered later; others were simultaneous but independent. This account is
intentionally heavily biased toward The Optical Society, and so, although we will try to retain
some breadth in the story, we will concentrate on those workers who were signicant in the
Society. Others, many of whom we will not mention, were also involved in and made signicant
contributions to the eld.
Beginnings
No one knows exactly when the technology of optical coatings started. As far as optical
instruments are concerned, the earliest was probably the simple mirror, and by 2000 B.C.
mirrors were common all over the world. Early mirrors were made from anything that could be
polished, and their reectance was simply that of the particular material. Obsidian, jade, bronze,
silver, or gold, even pots of water, were all used. The idea of using a coating to improve the
reectance was a later development. We know that the Romans employed many different
techniques for mirror manufacture, including some that we can classify as thin lms. Glass was a
common substrate. Mass production of cheap mirrors involved pouring molten lead over glass,
yielding irregular fragments that had somewhat raised reectance from the lead that stuck to the
glass, but quality was generally poor. Better, but more expensive, glass mirrors had lms of
mercury or gold leaf. Metal mirrors often carried layers of polished tin. Outstandingly clear glass
was developed in Murano in the middle of the fteenth century, and the production of what we
would describe as the rst modern mirrors followed soon after. These mirrors carried a coating
that was primarily a mercury amalgam of tin, although small amounts of other metals were also
sometimes added. Thus by the sixteenth century there was a well-established thin lm coating
industry but the coatings were solely of metals.
The development of interference coatings took rather longer. Of course, nature was rst in
the use of thin lm interference. Color in transparent thin lms must have been observed at a
very early stage of human development, but it was Isaac Newton who, in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century, painstakingly established the relationship between lm properties
and perceived color [1]. He realized that the same effects he saw in his thin lms were
responsible for many colors in nature and, mistakenly, thought that such effects were
responsible for all colors. Not much happened in thin lm optics from then until the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
Two major events in the early 1800s were the 1802 proposal by Thomas Young that light is
a wave [2,3] and the publication in 1810 of Goethes great book on color [4].
68
Young was not the rst to propose a wave theory for light, and, indeed, for a time the theory was
not generally accepted. It took the 1818 work of Fresnel on diffraction [5] to convince the eld. The
wave theory of light paved the way for the understanding of interference phenomena. Fresnel and
Poisson developed the idea of the absentee half-wave and the quarter-wave perfect anti-reection
coating [6]. By the end of the nineteenth century interference in thin lms was well understood, had
been recognized in nature, and was known to be responsible in the form of tarnish layers for an increase
in the transmittance of high-refractive-index lenses.
Goethes book contained in its rst edition a chapter by Seebeck, missing from subsequent editions,
dealing with experiments on precipitates of silver chloride where illumination was followed by
exhibition of reection of the very colors used for illumination. Wilhelm Zenker [7] realized that
this was an interference phenomenon that could be used in photography and also recognized that halfwave spacing of repeated features should give high reectance at the corresponding wavelength.
Zenkers work was the precursor to the Lippmann emulsion that won Gabriel Lippmann the 1908
Nobel Prize in Physics.
Metallic reecting coatings had also considerably developed during the nineteenth century. Justus
von Liebigs [8,9] development of a wet chemical deposition process for silver in the middle of the
century had transformed the production of reectors of all kinds. Interferometers required beamsplitters with semi-transparent reectors. Astronomy adopted mirrors constructed from stable glass
with silver coatings rather than the older, somewhat unstable, speculum metal. Sputtering was
sometimes used, but the general view was that it tended to distort the substrates and so it was not
much in favor. Then an important paper by Pohl and Pringsheim in 1912 [10] suggested a vacuum
process using what was then called distillation, but nowadays thermal evaporation, for mirror coatings.
A great advantage of this method was that with a substrate exhibiting a sufciently high quality of
surface nish, the coatings would immediately form a mirror of equal quality without any further need
of polishing.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, thin lm applications were largely in photographic
emulsions and in metallic reectors. There was as yet no real need for other kinds of optical coatings.
Also, strangely enough, although mirrors were much in demand, there seems to have been no great rush
to adopt Pohl and Pringsheims technique.
Early Efforts
The rst volume of the Journal of The Optical Society of America appeared in 1917. The second issue
(numbered as 2 and 3) contains two papers that would appear of great signicance to us today but,
from their citations, seem to have received little notice at the time. The rst paper, on what we would
now describe as an interference optical coating, was by Herbert Ives [11], who modied the treatment
of a Lippmann emulsion to produce a narrowband reecting lter of high efciency that we would
now call a notch lter. In the same issue Otto Stuhlmann [12] described his technique for depositing
metallic mirrors and beamsplitters by thermal evaporation from wire sources. Later, in volume 2,
Frederick Kollmorgen describes a spinning process for the protection by lacquer of silver lms,
solving the then current problem of applying a thin, uniform lm to protect silver surfaces from
tarnishing [13].
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, John Donovan Strong pioneered work in the deposition of
optical coatings. 1930 he joined the California Institute of Technology and teamed with Charles
Hawley Cartwright to investigate the deposition of an enormous number of metals and dielectrics [14].
By early 1931 Strong had coated, with quartz-protected silver, a 6-in. (15.24-cm) reector. The
following year he replaced the coating with one of aluminum. Aluminum had two great advantages. It
strongly reected the ultraviolet and it had an innate environmental resistance due, Strong was sure, to a
lm of oxide that naturally formed over the surface.
Meanwhile progress was being made in Germany and France. At the Carl Zeiss company in Jena
Alexander (Oleksandr) Smakula [15], of Ukrainian origin, developed an anti-reection coating for
lenses, which for several years remained a close secret and was used primarily for military applications.
69
Walter Geffcken at the sister company Schott in Jena, around the same time, produced the rst
narrowband interference lters [16]. Like Smakulas, most of Geffckens early advances were kept
secret. Alfred Thelens account of Geffckens work [17] makes fascinating reading. In France, Pierre
Rouard, in a 1932 paper [18], described his observation of a signicant reduction in internal reectance
at a glass surface induced by an overcoat of a very thin metal layer. He presented his thesis in Paris in
1936 [19], and it included an iterative technique for optical multilayer calculations.
In the United States, John Strong, completely independently of Smakula, realized that his
evaporated dielectric coatings could be used as a replacement for the tarnish layers that were known
to improve the transparency of glass elements. His paper [20] in the Journal of The Optical Society of
America was the rst account of such coatings to appear in the open literature. Strong coated the lenses
of a Leica camera that was probably the rst ever to be anti-reection coated by a vacuum process.
August Hermann Pfund, 1939 Ives Medalist and President of The Optical Society from 1943 to
1945, also made contributions in thin lm optics. In 1934 he published [21] an account of a dielectric
beamsplitter based on a thermally evaporated lm of zinc sulde for use in interferometers and other
systems where transmission was followed by reection at the same surface. In general, we see gradually
increasing interest in thin lm interference coatings, much of it, of course, directed toward antireection.
A particularly interesting individual of this era was Katharine Blodgett. In 1920 she became the rst
woman to be employed as a research scientist by the General Electric Company, where she began
working with Irving Langmuir, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1932. In 1926, she became
the rst woman ever to be awarded a Cambridge Ph.D. in physics. She then returned to GE, where she
continued the work that Langmuir had started on thin lms. In the course of this work she devised antireection coatings for glass. Her Journal publications primarily reported lms of barium stearate mixed
with stearic acid the acid being removed later by soaking in benzene to leave a barium stearate skeleton
behind. Very low reectances could be obtained in this way. Her 1940 patent [22], however, involved
the anti-reection of soda-lime window glass by adding to it a layer of glass containing a metal such as
lead or barium that could then be leached out by acid treatment to leave an etched layer of lower
refractive index that acted as an efcient anti-reection coating and, of course, was environmentally
resistant.
In 1937, Arthur Francis Turner and Hawley Cartwright began their ground-breaking research in
interference coatings including anti-reection coatings at MIT. The process they used was vacuum
evaporation and the materials for the anti-reection coatings metallic uorides, magnesium uoride
being specically mentioned in claim 6 of their 1940 patent [23]. The publication of this patent induced
Germany to publish the Smakula patent that had been kept secret. Turner and Cartwright made other
advances in anti-reection coatings including multilayers. Cartwright described to OSA the advantages
of anti-reection for camera lenses [24], while Miller did the same for the moving-picture community
[25]. Then Turner joined Bausch & Lomb in 1939, where he ran the Optical Physics Department until
his retirement in 1971.
War Years
Optical instruments of all kinds including binocular telescopes, submarine periscopes, range nders,
telescopic gun sights, and aircraft bomb sights were required for World War II. The performance of all
of these could be much improved, especially for use at dusk or dawn, by the addition of anti-reection
coatings. All the participants on either side in the war were involved in anti-reection coatings, yet they
were treated everywhere as highly secret.
Richard Denton joined the Frankford Arsenal in early 1942. In 1935 the staff consisted of eleven
people. By the end of 1943 the staff numbered 1100. His account of his experiences at the Arsenal [26]
paints a vivid picture of the rapid problem solving and innovation that was required by the needs of the
conict. Anti-reection coatings represented only a part of his responsibilities. Magnesium uoride had
been found most satisfactory, and soon virtually all optics were being coated to improve their
transmittance.
70
Around this time, the importance of heating the substrate during the deposition of the magnesium
uoride anti-reection coatings was recognized. Cartwright and Strong had included heated substrates
during deposition in their investigations at the California Institute of Technology [14] and found the
tenacity of silver much improved. Also with Turner he had secured a patent on post-deposition baking
of magnesium uoride [27]. Then Dean Lyon, who had worked on thin lms at MIT and now since
1941 was working at the Naval Research Laboratory, stumbled upon that old idea of heating the
elements in a vacuum [28]. He was eventually awarded a patent for this invention [29]. This process
was then used for the remainder of the war. After the war, the Bausch & Lomb company employed the
magnesium uoride process in the production of coated elements, and Lyon sued the company for
infringement of his patent in what was a celebrated case at the time and that in 1955 was nally decided
in his favor by the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
There was tremendous activity in optical coatings during the war, but little of this appeared in the
Society Journal. Frank Jones from the Mellon Institute of the University of Pittsburgh, who had been
funded since 1936 by the Bausch & Lomb company to investigate the deterioration of glass surfaces,
published with Howard Homer [30] a study of anti-reection of glass by chemical methods. However,
the papers that we would recognize immediately as of fundamental signicance in the development of
thin lm optics were by Mary Banning.
Mary Banning gained her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1941, and, in the summer of 1941, found
herself at the Institute of Optics charged with the creation of an optical thin lm laboratory [31]. Faced
with such a task nowadays we can turn to the established industry, obtain equipment, and study
information in books. She had to start from virtually nothing. Even what methods to use was not clear.
She decided on vacuum processes as her primary technique, built and operated the equipment, and
published four important papers in the Journal of The Optical Society of America [3235], all of which
contain a wealth of practical information and represent very much the foundation on which much of the
eld was built. One of the papers [34] contains what is still the best and fullest description of the design
and construction of an immersed polarizing beamsplitter.
Postwar Years
Now, after the war, the subject expanded rapidly. Part of the reason was the impetus given by the war
effort to the eld. Many people were involved in optical coating and found it an attractive and
rewarding eld. But also optics was ready for it. Great improvements could be produced by coating
camera lenses. High performance could be obtained from reecting coatings, avoiding the unpleasantness and unpredictability of the wet chemical processes. Interference lters could be made as easily for
one wavelength as another and had enormous energy grasp. Thin lm polarizers showed high efciency
without the need for expensive crystals. There were, of course, many military needs, but all of optics
was expanding. The chemical industry needed infrared instrumentation, and astronomy needed
telescopes and instrumentation and especially narrowband lters for increasing contrast of diffuse
nebulosities. Binoculars, photographic cameras, microscoscopes, surveying equipment, and navigational equipment all showed vastly improved performance with anti-reection coatings.
Optical coatings had developed in Germany during the war, and now the results were being
brought back to the United States. In 1946 Howard Tanner, who had been with the U.S. Naval
Technical Mission in Europe together with Luther Lockhart, both of the Naval Research Laboratory,
published a paper on some of the German anti-reection coatings. One of the coatings they described in
detail was a three-layer one based on a quarter-wave of intermediate index next to the substrate,
followed by a half-wave of high index and then nally a quarter-wave of low index. This gives high
performance over the visible region. It was further analyzed by Lockhart and Peter King [36], and the
idea of the half-wave layer that broadens the anti-reection performance has since appeared in coating
after coating and in many publications and patents.
Accurate calculation of the properties of coatings was of considerable interest, and a good number
of the contributions to the Journal at this time were theoretical and concerned optical property
calculation. Robert Mooney had two papers in the 19451946 volume of the Journal [38]. Antonin
71
Vasicek, the leading thin lm worker in Czechoslovakia, published several theoretical studies [3942],
and Doris Cabellero [43] and Walter Welford [44] also contributed. Most of this work used iterative
techniques, but Welford succeeded in putting his method into matrix form. Meanwhile, in France, a
young Florin Abels was gaining his doctorate with a thesis that laid the theoretical foundation of the
calculation techniques involving characteristic matrices that we almost universally use for our thin lms
today [45, 46].
It now becomes difcult to keep track of all that was happening in thin lm optics, and we give up
completely trying to track all of the signicant contributions, even just those to the Journal of The
Optical Society of America.
Pierre Rouard, in early 1944, had returned as Professor of Physics to Marseille and to optical thin
lms from a forced two-year absence in Clermont-Ferrand working on acoustics. In 1949 the French
Centre National de la Recherche Scientique, recognizing the tremendous expansion of optical
coatings, asked him to organize an international conference on optical coatings in Marseille. This
was the rst truly international conference devoted entirely to the Optical Properties of Thin Solid
Films. A special July 1950 issue of the Journal de Physique et le Radium carried the proceedings in a
mixture of English and French. Almost everyone of signicance in the eld was there. Rouard himself of
course, Strong (although now much more in astrophysics), Turner, Heavens, Dufour, Greenland, Ring,
Abels, are just a few of the names. Turner gave a paper [47] describing multilayer anti-reection
coatings, dielectric reectors, reection lters, narrowband transmission lters, and frustrated total
reection lters.
At the end of the war, many German scientists were recruited to continue their work in the United
States under Operation Paperclip run by the Ofce of Strategic Services. Two notable ones were
Alexander Smakula and Georg Hass. Hass was employed by the United States Army Signal Corps and
became director of a signicant infrared research activity at Fort Belvoir. He and his group wrote many
valuable practical papers dealing with such matters as protection of metallic mirrors and the properties
of new coating materials [4852]. Turner was running his research group at Bausch & Lomb, and he
became the recipient of a successful and important series of research contracts for infrared thin lm
coatings for which Hass was contract monitor. The Fort Belvoir contract reports, long out of print but
publicly available at the time, span the period 1950 to 1968 and include anti-reection coatings,
beamsplitters, multiple-cavity lters of many different kinds, and much theory on their designs. Ivan
Epstein was working with Turner and was responsible for the ideas of symmetrical periods in lter
design that are still used to great effect today [5355]. There were many other achievements. Turner and
Harold Schroeder won a Technical Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in
1961 for their development of a cold mirror coating for the condenser in movie projectors, much
reducing the constant re risk of the extreme ammability of the lm stock. He and Peter Berning [56]
introduced the concept of potential transmission and devised the induced transmission lter. More
information can be found here [57].
The 1950s marked great progress in optical coatings. Thin lms could now be recognized as a
discipline with workers who could be described as specialists. Books on the subject began to appear,
Herbert Mayers book on thin lms appeared in 1950 [58], followed by Oliver Heavenss in 1955 [59]
and Leslie Hollands in 1956 [60]. Then in 1960, Vasiceks book was published [61]. Newcomers to the
eld now had available excellent compact sources of information for rapid learning.
Astronomers began to be interested in narrowband lters. Many of the nebulosities that they were
observing were weak emitters of the hydrogen alpha line at 656.3 nm and were difcult to examine
against the broadband light from the night sky. Narrowband lters centered on the hydrogen alpha line
were found to improve contrast enormously. The study of solar prominences could also make use of
such lters, although for examination of features on the solar disk much narrower lters were required
and beyond the ability of the thin lm deposition methods available at that time. However, George
Dobrowolski showed in 1959 how to manufacture ultra-narrow lters using mica cavities [62].
Contemporary publications show clearly the great barrier to progress that was the volume of
calculation necessary in deriving the theoretical performance of an optical coating. The theory had
much in common with transmission lines, and Smith Charts were commonly adapted for thin lm
calculations. Approximate techniques were very popular. Computers existed and were occasionally
72
usedIvan Epstein was an early user for examplebut were cumbersome and not always readily
available nor user friendly. Workers in the eld tended to use empirical methods, tweaking performance
by inspired trial and error in the coating machine. Then in 1958, Philip Baumeister at the University of
California at Berkeley [63] showed what might be done in an account of the design of a lter by
successive approximations on an IBM 650 computer. This marked the beginnings of the computeraided design of optical coatings.
By the end of the 1950s we could recognize the modern eld of optical coatings. Many companies
were producing optical coatings, and there were other companies specializing in the supply of
equipment and materials.
Now two very signicant events, especially for optical coatings but also for the entire eld of optics,
occurred. On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched the rst articial earth satellite, Sputnik 1,
ushering in the Space Age. Then on 16 May 1960, Theodore Maiman achieved successful operation of
the rst laser. Things were never the same again.
Conclusion
Optics has long reached the stage where optical systems without coatings are unthinkable. Thin lm
coatings play a variety of roles. In many cases they enable optical components and systems better to
perform their function that may be quite different from that of their optical coatings. The anti-reection
coating improves transmission and reduces glare, but the function of the system might be to magnify
distant objects. Enabling applications were the main driver for optical coatings in the very early days.
Later, with the appearance of the narrowband lter and the thin lm polarizer, we begin to see
components whose critical performance is purely that of the thin lm system, thus extending the role of
coatings well beyond that of a purely enabling technology. By 1960 that extension of the role of optical
coatings was becoming clear.
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75
PRE1940
19411959
19601974
19751990
1991PRESENT
19601974
Introduction
Jeff Hecht
hysics as a whole boomed in the middle of the twentieth century, but optics remained a
seemingly sleepy backwater compared with hot elds such as nuclear physics, electronics,
and astronautics. Yet the seeds of two technological revolutions were growing quietly,
fertilized by the generous government research funding that had fueled the rapid expansion of
physics. One was the development of space optics for surveillance satellites, which in time would
stabilize the uneasy balance of nuclear power. The other was the birth of the laser, which brought
new excitement and ideas to optics.
The development of spy satellites was among the deepest of military secrets in 1960. The
effort had begun quietly in 1955, as military and intelligence ofcials realized that satellites
might offer a new window on the Soviet Unions nuclear activities. That priority grew more
important with the Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957, which both showed that spaceight was
possible and established the precedent that satellites above the atmosphere could y over
countries without violating their airspace. Advanced optics were as crucial to the effort as
rockets; without good optics, the satellites could not record images of the ground clearly
enough for intelligence analysts to interpret them. Just weeks after Sputnik, the U.S. started a
crash optics program called CORONA, described in this section by Kevin Thompson, which
eventually succeeded in lming Soviet nuclear activity from space, helping to ease nuclear
tensions. The Hexagon program that followed, described by Phil Pressel, built on CORONAs
success.
The laser was an outgrowth of a military program seeking higher-frequency microwave
sources that led Charles Townes to develop the maser, then to think of how to extend the
principle of amplifying stimulated emission to even higher frequencies. Laser light brought
dramatic new possibilities to opticsmonochromatic and coherent light that could be concentrated into a beam of energy.
Irnee DHaenens, who assisted Ted Maiman in making the rst laser, may have been the rst
to call the laser a solution looking for a problem, and it was a cute joke in the early 1960s. But
in reality the laser opened the door to solving a host of previously intractable problems. One
series of articles in this section tells of the development of new varieties of lasers, made from
gases, new types of solids, semiconductors, and organic dyes in solution. Another article tells
how companies began manufacturing lasers for others to use.
The laser also opened up whole new elds of endeavor, covered in other articles in this
section. The intensity of laser light revealed nonlinear effects that had previously been
impossible to observe. The coherence of laser light made practical a radically new form of
truly three-dimensional imaging called holography. Lasers offered precise new ways of
measurement, from remote sensing to ultra-precise metrology. Laser beams could cut or drill
materials, print words on paper or record data on optical disks, or read printed patterns to
automate checkout at stores.
Lasers soon launched whole new government programs, described in other articles in this
section. Concern about nuclear attack led to efforts to develop laser weapons that could destroy
targets at the speed of light, a program that would wax and wane with the arms race and progress
(or lack of it) in building high-power lasers until the present day. The lasers ability to focus
intense energy onto pinpoint spots led to research on laser fusion, both as a way to generate
79
energy and to simulate nuclear weapons. The lasers narrow linewidth and tunability led to efforts to
enrich isotopes, both for nuclear reactors and to make bombs.
And the echoes of laser ideas, stimulated in the early years of the laser revolution, also resonate
through the remaining sections of this history.
80
Introduction
19601974

Jeff Hecht
lbert Einstein planted the seed that grew into the laser when he realized the possibility of
stimulated emission in 1916, the year The Optical Society (OSA) was founded. Experiments in the 1920s conrmed the existence of stimulated emission, then called negative
absorption, but it seemed only a matter of academic interest. Russian physicist Valentin
Fabrikant in 1939 proposed using stimulated emission to amplify light but did not pursue the
idea at the time.
Charles Townes made the rst major step toward the laser at Columbia University in 1951
when he proposed isolating excited ammonia molecules in a resonant cavity so stimulated
emission could oscillate at microwave frequencies. In 1954, Townes and his student James
Gordon demonstrated the rst maser, shown in Fig. 1, a word he coined from microwave
amplication by the stimulated emission of radiation. Microwave masers soon became
important as high-frequency oscillators and low-noise ampliers.
With millimeter waves and the far infrared then vast terra incognita, the next logical step was to
develop stimulated emission at infrared and optical wavelengths. The key requirements were a
medium with energy levels that could be inverted to produce stimulated emission in the optical
band, a way to produce a population inversion, and a cavity in which the light waves could oscillate.
That took some serious rethinking, and in the summer of 1957 Townes began a systematic
analysis of how to build what he called an optical maser. In essence, he formulated the physics
problem that had to be solved to develop the laser. As part of his investigation, in late October
Townes talked with Gordon Gould, a graduate student under Polykarp Kusch, about optical
pumping, which Gould was using to excite thallium vapor for his dissertation research. Optical
pumping was new, and Townes thought it might produce an optical population inversion. The
two talked twice, then went their separate ways.
Townes enlisted the aid of his brother-in-law, Arthur Schawlow, who worked at Bell Labs
and had experience in optics. Schawlow proposed using a pair of parallel mirrors to form a
FabryPerot resonator for the laser. They initially considered using thallium vapor as the active
medium, but Schawlow decided potassium vapor was more promising, so they focused their
attention on that system, and also noted that solids could be optically pumped. Reviewers at Bell
Labs, where Townes was a consultant, urged them to analyze cavity modes, which they included
in their pioneering paper, Infrared and optical masers, in the 15 December 1958 Physical
Review [1], which laid the groundwork for early laser development.
They did not know that Gould had jumped on the idea earlier. At age 37, he was growing
impatient with his dissertation. Gould had worked with optics before, and within weeks after
talking with Townes he described a FabryPerot laser resonator in a notebook that he had
notarized on 13 November 1957, shown in Fig. 2. Filled with dreams of becoming an inventor,
he left Columbia, talked with a patent lawyer, and holed up in his apartment with a pile of
references to work out his plans for what he called the LASER. Gould had solved the laser
problem on his own, and in time he would develop an extensive catalog of potential laser
transitions. But neither he nor Townes and Schawlow were close to building a working laser.
They had the blueprint, but nding the right material was a serious problem.
Alkali metal vapors were attractive because they are simple systems easy to describe in
theory. They did not offer much gain, but they looked promising for a proof-of-principle physics
experiment. Townes thought it would make a good dissertation project, as the microwave maser
81
had been for Gordon, and put two of his

students, Herman Cummins and Isaac
Abella, to work on it.
Schawlow pursued optical pumping
of solids, a natural because Bell Labs was
deeply involved in solid-state physics.
Schawlow initially focused on synthetic
ruby, which was also being used in
solid-state microwave masers and was
readily available at Bell. However, the
spectroscopy of ruby discouraged him.
The red transitions which had looked attractive turned out to be three-level transitions terminating in the ground state, making it hard to invert the population. Moreover, other Bell researchers had found that
the red emission was inefcient, so he
began looking for other candidates.
As word of the laser circulated around
Bell, others developed their own ideas. Ali
Javan proposed a novel scheme for exciting a gas laser with an electric discharge in
a mixture of helium and neon. The helium
would absorb energy from the discharge,
producing an excited state with energy
Fig. 1. Townes and Gordon with ammonia maser. (AIP
very close to a neon transition. Collisions
Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.)
would excite the neon to a metastable
upper laser level, which would then emit
on a transition to a level well above the ground statea four-level system that looked attractive for
continuous laser emission.
Gould, meanwhile, had gone to work at a defense contractor, Technical Research Group Inc., to
support himself while working on his laser ideas. He had hoped to keep his ideas secret, but eventually
worked out a deal to share patent rights with TRG, which helped him develop a patent and write a grant
for research on building a laser. In early 1959, Gould and TRG president Larry Goldmuntz pitched
their proposal to the Advanced Research Projects Agency, then less than a year old and chartered to
explore daring new ideas. ARPA was so impressed that they approved a contract for $999,000more
than triple the $300,000 TRG had requested.
By then, publication of the SchawlowTownes paper had put the laser into public view, interesting
other researchers in trying to make one. The ARPA contract was serious money at the time, intended to
support efforts to demonstrate laser action in a number of media. Laser development was becoming a
race, but it would not be an easy one.
The rst public reports on laser experiments came at a 1518 June 1959 conference on optical
pumping at the University of Michigan. Worried that the Pentagon might classify all laser research, not
just its TRG project, Bell Labs management encouraged Javan to describe his work both at the meeting
and in Physical Review Letters. Javan reported some progress in understanding energy transfer in
helium-neon discharges in experiments he had begun with William Bennett. Gould described his ideas
and hinted at the size of TRGs military program but was vague on details. Meanwhile, Gould was
having trouble getting the security clearance he needed to work on the TRG project because of his past
involvement with communists.
September saw a meeting much better remembered, the rst Quantum Electronics Conference at
Shawanga Lodge in High View, New York. Sponsored by the Ofce of Naval Research, it was the rst in
a series of biennial meetings that became the International Quantum Electronics Conference. Only two
speakers at the 1959 meeting talked about lasers. Javan described the early stages of his helium-neon
82
research, but had little to say beyond his

Physical Review Letters report [2]. Schawlow wrote off pink ruby, with low chromium concentration, because as a three-level
system he thought it would emit light too
inefciently for use in a laser.
Most speakers described microwave
maser research. Among them was Theodore Maiman, who had built a surprisingly
compact ruby maser at Hughes Research
Laboratories in California, and was looking around for a new project. He had
thought about optically pumping a microwave maser, but the optical laser caught
his eye. Despite Schawlows doubts,
Maiman decided to start with ruby because he was familiar with it. He thought
studying where rubys energy went would
help him identify a better material. But his
careful measurements showed the quantum efciency of ruby uorescence was
nearly 100%.
Ruby did have another problem: it
was a three-level laser, with the ground
state as the lower laser level. Four-level
Fig. 2. First page of Goulds notebook denes LASER. (AIP
lasers were better for the continuous-wave
Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Hecht Collection.)
lasers that most groups were trying to
make. When Maiman sat down and calculated the pump power requirements for ruby, he found that even the brightest arc lamp available would
make only a marginal continuous-wave laser.
Instead of giving up, he shifted gears and thought about making a pulsed laser to demonstrate the
principle. He soon found that photographic ashlamps could emit peak power much higher than the
brightest arc lamp and ordered a few coiled ashlamps in three different sizes, all of which he calculated
could pump a ruby laser.
To test his ideas, Maiman silvered the ends of a ngertip-size stubby ruby rod and scraped a hole in
the silver on one end for the beam to emerge. He slipped the ruby inside the coil of the smallest
ashlamp, then slid the lamp inside a hollow metal cylinder, to reect pump light back onto the rod and
separate the pump light from the red pulse he hoped the ruby would emit (see Fig. 3). Then, on 16 May
1960, he and his assistant Irnee DHaenens cranked up the voltage on the ashlamp power supply step
by step. Initially, the ruby uoresced when the ashlamp pulsed, growing brighter as voltage increased.
When they exceeded 950 volts, the red pulses grew much brighter, and an oscilloscope screen displaying
the pulse shape showed Maiman the changes he had expected for a laser.
Word of the success spread quickly through the lab, but Maiman insisted on performing further
experiments to verify the results. When those tests conrmed the laser, word went up the management
ladder, and Maiman wrote a paper, which he airmailed to Physical Review Letters on 22 June. PRL had
just published his report of ruby uorescence, and he was condent that the laser papera far more
important achievementwould be quickly accepted.
He was stunned when editor Samuel Goudsmit summarily rejected the laser paper without sending
it to referees. Maiman had violated two of Goudsmits pet peeves. Tired of reports of minor progress on
microwave masers, Goudsmit said he would run no more maser papers, but Maiman had titled his
paper Optical maser action in ruby. Goudsmit also disapproved of serial publication, and Physics
Review Letters had just published Maimans report on ruby uorescence. Maiman protested that the
paper was a major advance, but Goudsmit would not listen.
83
Rejection by Physical Review Letters

was a serious blow in 1960, when it was
the only physics journal offering rapid
publication. To stake his claim to the laser,
Maiman dashed off a short note to the
weekly Nature, which quickly scheduled it
for publication on 6 August [3]. He sent a
longer paper to the letters section of the
Journal of Applied Physics, which accepted it, but could not publish it for six
months. (Applied Physics Letters did not
begin publication until 1962.)
Hughes managers knew others were
working on lasers, and were thinking
about holding a press conference when
Malcolm Stitch called from a Rochester
conference warning that Columbia was
close to making their laser work. In fact,
they were not at all close; Oliver Heavens,
on sabbatical at Columbia, had waxed
much too enthusiastic at the meeting. But
it was enough for Hughes to schedule a
press conference in New York on 7 July.
Fig. 3. Maiman shows the simple structure of the worlds rst
The news made page 1 of the New
laser. (Reproduced by permission of Kathleen Maiman.)
York Times, and stunned other laser developers. Reached on the phone by a reporter,
Abella did not believe ruby could have lased, until the reporter explained Maiman had used a ashlamp.
The laser quickly passed the acid test of replication; within three weeks, TRG had used press reports to
demonstrate their own ruby laseralthough they all showed Maiman with a laser design different than
the one that worked. Bell Labs followed. By then, Maiman had received a ruby rod of much better
optical quality that projected a bright spot on the wall.
The ruby laser excited the optics community, and The Optical Society invited Maiman to talk at the
1960 OSA Annual Meeting, held 1214 October in Boston. It was his rst report on the laser at a
scientic conference, and the New York Times sent its top science writer, Walter Sullivan, to cover it.
His demonstration of ashlamp pumping inspired others. At the IBM Watson Research Center,
Peter Sorokin and Mirek Stevenson had been trying to make four-level solid-state lasers with elaborate
total-internal-reection cavities. They bought ashlamps, had their crystals cut into rods, and soon
demonstrated the second and third lasers, on lines of uranium and scandium in calcium uoride. They
were the rst four-level lasers.
Bell Labs was close behind. On 12 December, Javan, Bennett, and Donald Herriott demonstrated
the rst helium-neon laser on a near-infrared line at 1.15 m. By the end of 1960, the laser age was
launched.
Note: This essay is based on material from Ref. [4].
References
1. A. L. Schawlow and C. H. Townes, Infrared and optical masers, Phys. Rev. 112, 19401949 (1958).
2. A. Javan, W. R. Bennett, Jr., and D. R. Herriott, Population inversion and continuous optical maser
oscillation in a gas discharge containing a HeNe mixture, Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 106110 (1961).
3. T. Maiman, Stimulated optical radiation in ruby, Nature 187, 493 (1960).
4. J. Hecht, Beam: The Race to Make the Laser (Oxford, 2005).
84
19601974

Jeff Hecht
ptics prospered along with other areas of physics and engineering as American research
universities grew after World War II. Military programs encouraged universities to
expand basic research, both in hope of developing new defense technology and to train
specialists for defense research at government agencies or defense contractors. Over the years
from 1938 to 1953, military support of university physics research soared by a factor of 20 to 25,
after adjusting for ination.
These programs provided both bright new ideas and bright people to help launch the laser
era in optics. The Columbia Radiation Laboratory, founded in 1942 at Columbia University to
develop new microwave tubes for 30-GHz radar, received $250,000 a year after the war from the
Army Signal Corps to continue microwave research in Columbias physics department. At the
time, that was enough to support a staff of 20 and nearly as many graduate students, as well as to
pay several faculty members over the summer. Charles Townes headed the radiation lab from
1950 to 1952, during the time he conceived of the microwave maser.
Military research dollars also produced new physicists. American universities had graduated
about 150 new physics Ph.D.s annually just before the war, and the number dropped steeply
during the conict. But from 1945 to 1951 the number of physics Ph.D. graduates doubled every
1.7 years, reaching about 500 per year, as shown in Fig. 1. Seeing where the jobs were, postwar
students concentrated on experimental physics. Engineering likewise boomed in the postwar
years, with 159,600 bachelors degrees awarded from 1946 to 1950, more than from 1926
through 1940.
Dwight Eisenhower had seen part of that growth as president of Columbia University from
1948 to 1951, but as President of the United States he cut military research spending in 1953, and
the number of physics Ph.D.s remained in the 500600 range through the 1950s. The cuts led
universities to scale down their programs. Boston University went further, shutting the optics lab
it had inherited from Harvard; veterans of that group became the nucleus of the Itek Corporation, founded in 1957 by Richard Leghorn with funding from the Rockefeller family.
Eisenhower changed course after the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957 stunned
the American physics community, the Pentagon, and politicians. Fearing the U.S. was falling
behind in an arms race in space, his administration boosted funding for physics and engineering
research and education. The money brought quick results. The number of Ph.D.s graduating
from American universities rose exponentially from about 500 in 1960 to some 1600 in 1970,
faster than the growth of Ph.D.s in any other eld. The number of American universities offering
Ph.D.s in physics climbed from 52 in 1950 to 78 in 1960 and reached 148 in 1970. The number
of undergraduate degrees in physics also climbed, from 1000 in 1945 to a peak above 6000 in
1968. Engineering degrees also increased. The numbers reected both growth in overall college
enrollment and an increase in the fraction of students studying physics and engineering. It did not
include the Postwar baby boom, who started to graduate from college in 1968.
The arms race, the space race, fast-growing industrial labs, and a booming technology
industry created unprecedented demand, particularly for physicists. A 1964 report from the
American Institute of Physics found that in 1960 only 17,300 trained physicists were available to
ll some 29,000 physics-related jobs in the U.S. Its not clear how many of the excess jobs went
unlled or were lled by people lacking physics degrees, but the decit seemed formidableand
the gap was projected to reach 20,000 by 1970.
85
Fig. 1. Number of Ph.D.

physicists graduating from
American universities annually,
showing the dramatic postwar
boom and post-1970 decline.
( 2002 by The Regents of the
University of California. All rights
reserved [1].)
A tripling of government research and development funding from 1955 to 1965 helped propel the
boom, with defense and space programs leading the way. The birth of the laser and increasing military
use of electro-optics pumped up spending on optical research and development, and in 1962 OSAs
Needs in Optics Committee concluded that existing training programs could ll only a quarter of the
need for 3500 new optics specialists in the coming ve years [2].
Yet by the mid-1960s, the well-oiled machinery of growth had begun hitting serious bumps in the
road. Doubts were growing about Americas escalating involvement in Vietnam, and opponents were
raising questions about the presence of military research on university campuses. Budget watchers
worried that the country could not afford to continue pumping more money into basic research while
ghting a war. Pentagon auditors found that military spending on basic research yielded a disappointing return on investment and urged focusing narrowly on mission-oriented research and development.
Congress began pressing to cut military spending on basic research, and spending on new research
buildings was stopped in early 1967, forcing some creative nancing to build the new Optical Sciences
Center at the University of Arizona [2]. Congress complained that too much research money was going
to a few elite universities, and too little to other Congressional districts. Topping off the trend, the
Manseld amendment in 1969 barred Pentagon spending on research lacking direct military applications, although those restrictions were later eased.
Universities also began re-examining their military research policies, pushed by faculty and student
protests. In 1967 Columbia, an early hotbed of protests, divested its Electronics Research Laboratory,
which became the Riverside Research Institute. More would follow. Stanford in 1970 split off the
Stanford Research Institute, later SRI International, and in 1972 MIT divested its Instrumentation
Laboratory, which became the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. The most important split for the
optics world probably was the University of Michigans 1972 divestiture of its off-campus Willow Run
Laboratories, the birthplace of laser holography and optical signal processing.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that the rapid growth powered by the space and arms
races could not continue, but students recruited with promises of well-paying jobs were caught by
surprise. Recruitment advertisements, which had fattened campus newspapers at elite schools like
Caltech, began evaporating after 1967. Job fairs at physics conferences shrank. Only 253 jobs were
advertised at the American Physical Societys 1968 annual meeting, but nearly 1000 applicants showed
up, and over 1500 people received Ph.D.s that year. Two years later, 1010 job-hunters chased 63 jobs at
the APS April meeting. American physics had indeed reached a crisis by 1970, exactly when the 1964
report had predicted, wrote MIT historian David Kaiser [1]. But the crisis was a shortage of jobs rather
than of physics graduates.
Inevitably, graduate enrollment shrank, and the number of new physics Ph.D.s dropped from a
peak of 1600 at the start of the 1970s to about 1000 per year at the end. Physics research continued
growing, but at a much slower pace. One measure of research, the number of abstracts published each
year in Physics Abstracts, increased about 3% a year from 1971 to 1999only a quarter of the 12%
86
annual growth from 1945 to 1971. Optics in general fared better than many other specialties, leading
some physicists in hard-hit elds to move into optics.
Engineers were caught in a similar crunch. Ph.D.s in electrical engineering, the major most related
to optics, peaked at 858 in 1971, then slid steadily to 451 in 1978, a 47% droplarger than the 37%
drop in physics Ph.D.s. The decline in bachelors degrees, which in the 1970s were typically the terminal
degree in engineering, was much less. Electrical engineering undergraduate degrees peaked at 12,288 in
19701971, then bottomed out at 9874 in 1976, only a 20% drop [3]. Many of those engineers, and
some physicists, wound up in the fast-growing computer industry. Others ended up in optics.
Optics also felt the slowdown of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but with only a handful of schools
training optical engineers and physicists, optics still offered opportunities for young physicists and
engineers. Many of the newcomers adapted their skills to work on lasers and ber optics, the fastestgrowing elds in optics in the 1970s and 1980s. The newcomers brought new skills, and helped optics
grow into new areas as they developed their careers.
References
1. D. Kaiser, Cold war requisitions, scientic manpower, and the production of American physicists after
World War II, in Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Vol. 33 (University of
California Press, 2002), Part 1, pp. 131159.
2. S. Wilks, from the History of OSA (to be published).
3. M. K. Fiegener, Science and Engineering Degrees: 19662010: detailed statistical tables (National
Science Foundation, June 2013).
87
19601974
Gas LasersThe Golden

Decades, 19601980
William B. Bridges
y all rights, gas lasers should have been discovered long before 1961, likely by accident.
Einsteins 1917 classic paper derived the relationship among spontaneous emission,
stimulated emission, and absorption, but only considered a system in thermodynamic
equilibrium (guaranteed not to oscillate). It remained only to ask: What if the system were not in
thermodynamic equilibrium? Yet despite countless experiments looking at the absorption of
radiation in gas discharge tubes (not in thermodynamic equilibrium), the rst gas laser had to
wait for Ali Javan of Bell Telephone Laboratories.
First Gas Laser

In 1959 Javan proposed four different ways to make a gas laser:
(1) A gas discharge in pure neon.
(2) A gas discharge in pure helium.
(3) Resonant collisions in between excited krypton and mercury atoms in a discharge
exciting the Hg (91P) or Hg (61F) levels, creating an inversion in the mercury levels.
(4) Helium atoms in the (23S) level in a gas discharge exciting Ne (2s) levels to create an
inversion in neon levels.
The rst three systems do not actually work, but fortunately Javan and his Bell coworkers
Bill Bennett and Don Herriott did the fourth experiment. They excited a mixture of helium and
neon with a radio-frequency discharge in a gas tube with at end mirrors coated for maximum
reectivity near 1-m wavelength, as depicted in Fig. 1. Oscillation of the neon transition 2s2
2p4 at 1.1523 m made the rst gas laser.
Gas Lasers Using Neutral Atoms

Once the word was out, everybody had to have a heliumneon laser, and a war-surplus night
vision scope to see the infrared laser output. Hughes Research Laboratories was no exception,
and the author found himself in the queue to get one from a mini production line that Hughes had
set up. The author had been interested in developing a microwave traveling wave tube (his former
professional interest) as a high-frequency photodetector for laser communications and had
already done experiments with a pulsed ruby laser. The continuous operation of the HeNe laser
was more attractive for communications, despite the need for a new detector. But fate intervened.
The author had planned to attend the annual Conference on Electron Device Research in late
June with his boss, Don Forster, and Hughes Associate Director, Mal Currie. Currie decided they
should visit Bell Labs on the way to see what was new and interesting. They were astounded to
see a red HeNe laser operating at about 10 mW, in the lab shown in Fig. 2. The three researchers saw
the now familiar red sandpaper speckle of truly coherent light (which was not very evident in the IR
HeNe laser viewed with a night-vision scope). Alan White and J. Dane Rigden had found another
88
metastable level in helium, the 2s1S0, that

collected population from higher-lying helium levels, and was near resonance with the
3s2 level in neon. That created a population
inversion with the 2p4 level on the red laser
line at 0.6328 m and oscillation when redreecting mirrors were used for feedback.
White and Rigden were in a different Bell
technical group from Javan, Bennett, and
Herriot, and enjoyed the rivalry. When they
announced the red laser the next week at the
conference, the rivalry between the two
groups was quite evident.
That night on the drive back from Bell
in New Jersey to our hotel in New York,
the group discussed the new red laser.
Fig. 1. Ali Javan, W. Bennett, and D. Herriott with the rst
Currie (who was driving) ended by saying
HeNe
laser at Bell Laboratories. (Reprinted with permission of
We have to have one! The author sensed
Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc., courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual
that he had just received a battleeld proArchives, Physics Today Collection.)
motion to Gas Laser Researcher.
Heliumneon gas mixtures turn out to
have several infrared lines from 2s levels to 2p levels, and several lines from green to deep red between
the 3s2 level and 2p levels. In addition, several infrared lines in the 3-m range have so much gain that
they can easily suppress the red laser line. Arnold Bloom, Earl Bell, and Bob Rempel of Spectra-Physics
found that they could prevent 3-m emission by adding an intracavity prism.
Other researchers rushed to extend these results. Another Bell Labs group built a 10-m discharge
tube to obtain oscillation on many more infrared lines to wavelengths beyond 100 m in various noblegas mixtures. This early burst of research showed that oscillation was possible in pure noble gas
discharges, without adding helium. That led to a burst of research on the noble gases, which are easy to
investigate because they do not interact with the discharge tube walls or electrodes.
Interest soon turned to other materials, starting with the permanent gases such as oxygen, nitrogen,
and chlorine, which dissociate into atoms in a discharge, and expanding to easily vaporized elements
such as mercury, iodine, and sulfur. Reports of new lasers multiplied, and it seemed that almost
anything that you could vaporize and put in a gas discharge would lase. Figure 3 shows how the ranks
of lasing elements grew during the rst two decades, the golden age of gas laser research. The author
Fig. 2.
J. D. Rigden, A. D. White,
and W. W. Rigrod with the rst red
HeNe laser at Bell Laboratories.
(Courtesy of Alan White.)
89
personally had no doubt that you could

make a gas laser from such hard to vaporize
elements as tungsten, osmium, rhenium,
and iridium if you could put a discharge
through them in vapor form, but the technical community so far has not felt it was
worth the effort.
Fig. 3. Timeline for the discovery of laser oscillation in neutral
The technology for HeNe lasers is
atoms during the golden age of gas laser research, 1962 to the
actually pretty simple; think neon sign.
1980s.
A simple glass tube, 2 to 10 mm in diameter
and 100 to 2000 mm in length, was commonly used. A DC discharge of 2 to 10 mA
is typically required. (A radio-frequency
discharge at 27 MHz was used in the rst
HeNe laser, but DC is simpler.) The gain
of a typical red HeNe laser is quite low,
only a few percent per meter. But the optical gain of a 3.39-m HeNe laser can be
tens of decibels per meter, so a meter-long
discharge tube might well oscillate with the
feedback from the rst surface reection of
Fig. 4. A simple heliumneon gas laser typical of those in
supermarket optical scanners. The cavity mirrors are attached
an uncoated glass window perpendicular to
directly to the ends of the small diameter discharge tube. An
the optical path. A simple discharge tube in
aluminum cold cathode surrounds the discharge tube. Tubes like
pure xenon may easily exhibit 20-dB gain at
this sold for about $100, and typically lasted for over 10,000
3.508 m. This is the authors argument
hours.
that the gas laser should have been discovered by accident long ago (but no one
records such an event).
The rst commercial HeNe lasers sold for about $20,000, but the prices quickly dropped as
commercial manufacturers learned the tricks, and large-scale applications developed. By 1970, the
2-mW-output lasers of the type shown in Fig. 4 that were used in early supermarket checkout scanners
sold for about $100 (plus power supply). The mirrors were sealed directly on the ends of the glass
envelope with a low-melting-temperature glass frit. Millions of such HeNe lasers were manufactured,
but now this application has all but been taken over by red diode lasers, and HeNe lasers will soon
become collectors items.
Ionized Gas Lasers

In the course of investigating new gas lasers in 1963, W. Earl Bell and Arnold Bloom of SpectraPhysics discovered the rst gas laser that oscillated on energy levels of ions while testing mixtures of
helium and mercury. Like the early HeNe laser, they used a simple glass discharge tube, a few
millimeters in diameter and about a meter long. The key difference was using high current pulses of a
few tens of amperes, rather than a constant current of few mA. This produced laser pulses with peak
power of a few watts at wavelengths of 0.5677 and 0.6150 m in the green and orangean
important milestone because the green line at the time was the shortest visible wavelength yet
produced by a laser. Figure 5 shows Bell in his laboratory at Spectra-Physics with an early pulsed
HeHg+ laser.
The excitation mechanisms behind the HeHg+ laser were unclear at the time, and at least four
groups tried to pin it down, including Bloom and Bell; Rigden (who had moved to Perkin-Elmer);
G. Convert, M. Armand, and P. Martinot-Lagarde at CSF in France; and the author at Hughes.
Independent experiments by Rigden and the author showed that a neonmercury discharge could also
produce the orange mercury-ion line, ruling out simple charge exchange as the mechanism.
90
To put an extra nail in the cofn of charge

exchange, the author tried an argonmercury discharge. (Argon has an ionization potential well
below that of neon.) This initially did not produce
the orange and green Hg II laser lines, so the mixture
was pumped out. After the tube was relled with a
helium-mercury mixture, the discharge again produced the orange and green Hg II laser linesplus a
turquoise blue laser output, which turned out to be
ionized argon, shown in Fig. 6. The blue pulse
coincided with the electron current, not the discharge afterglow, suggesting that electron collision
was the mechanism behind the argon-ion oscillation. That system, similar to the one shown with the
author in Fig. 6, opened up a new chapter. It was
Valentines Day, 14 February 1964.
Fig. 5. W. E. Bell in his laboratory at SpectraPhysics with an early pulsed helium-mercury ion laser.
It turned out that the groups at Spectra-Physics,
(AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, gift of W. Earl Bell.)
CSF, and Hughes had independently discovered the
Ar II 0.4879-m laser. So had W. R. Bennett, Jr., J.
W. Knutson, Jr., G. N. Mercer, and J. L. Detch at
Yale University, who had not been studying mercury-ion lasers but were trying to make an argon-ion
laser! It was clearly an idea whose time had come.
Another group at Bell Laboratories, E. I. Gordon, E.
F. Labuda, and R. C. Miller, found that the argonion laser could emit continuously, unlike the mercury-ion laser. In a matter of months, water-cooled
discharge tubes were emitting more than 2 W continuously. The efciency was below 0.1%, so several kilowatts of input was needed, requiring major
improvements in discharge tubes.
Other noble-gas ion lasers followed quickly.
More than two dozen laser lines in krypton and
xenon ions were discovered within a week of the
argon laser. Neon oscillation followed in a couple of
months, the time needed to obtain cavity mirrors at
the right wavelengths. Spectrographic plates
recorded laser oscillation on lines of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon left as impurities in the discharge
tubes. Further spectroscopic research discovered
laser emission from multiply ionized species at
higher peak currents.
Watts of continuous-wave blue laser light
Fig. 6. Photograph of the author with a pulsed
argon-ion laser in his laboratory in February 1964: an
opened the possibility of new applications. Among
air-cooled fused silica discharge tube with Brewsters
the rst was improving coagulation to repair deangle windows and external mirrors. Pulse lengths of a
tached retinas, which had been done with highfew microseconds with a simple capacitor discharge
power xenon lamps and later ruby lasers. Krypand rates of a few hundred per second were used.
ton-ion lasers, able to emit red, yellow, green, and
blue light simultaneously, were quickly adopted for light shows. Their use at rock concerts introduced
new types of customers to laser companies that were used to scientists; one customer arrived at SpectraPhysics with a wad of hundred-dollar bills to buy a krypton laser, put the laser in his station wagon, and
drove off to a show that night. By far the largest application for ion lasers became high-power pumps
for dye lasers, making ion lasers the power supply for much science.
91
Molecular Gas Lasers

Nobel Laureate and former Optical Society President Arthur Schawlow once said, A diatomic
molecule is a molecule with one atom too many. However, for molecular lasers this author would
say instead, If one atom is good, then several must be better. Molecules have more degrees of freedom
than atoms or ions, including the number and kind of atoms, the molecular structure, the nature of
energy levels, and type of pumping, leading to the demonstration of thousands of molecular lasers. The
rst was carbon monoxide, which L. E. S. Mathias and J. T. Parker made oscillate on electronic
transitions in a pulsed discharge at 0.8 to 1.2 m. Close behind it was the 0.337-m N2 laser
demonstrated by H. G. Heard. The third molecular laser would be the charmand most successfulthe 9- to 11-m CO2 laser, discovered at Bell by C. K. N. Patel, W. L. Faust, and R. A. McFarlane.
The diatomic noble gases, noble-gas halides, and noble-gas oxides in the list exist only in an
electronically excited state, called an excimer. The population inversion occurs because the molecule
quickly falls apart into atoms when it drops to the ground state. The rare gas-halide excimers have
become commercially important because they produce powerful pulses in the vacuum ultraviolet. The
193-nm argon-uoride laser is used in laser ablation of the cornea to correct vision defects and in highresolution lithography to make silicon integrated circuits.
Larger and more complex gas molecules also have been made to oscillate, mostly by optical
pumping with the 9- to 11-m light from CO2 lasers. These larger molecules have hundreds of
rotational/vibrational transitions in the far-infrared region, and to make matters more complicated, the
wavelengths depend on the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopes in the molecule.
The most important molecular gas laser, CO2, like the HeNe laser, depends on energy transfer
from a more abundant species to the light emitter, so it might better be called the nitrogenCO2 laser.
Typically a discharge excites a gas mixture of ten parts N2 and one part CO2, with most energy going to
excite N2 molecules to their lowest vibrational level, which is metastable so it cannot radiate. However,
they can transfer energy by colliding with CO2 molecules, which have a near-resonant energy level that
produces a vibrational population inversion. CO2 oscillation occurs on rotational sublevels of the
inverted vibrational level, which can be selected by tuning the cavity.
Carbon dioxide lasers can have efciency of 10% or more, among the highest of any gas laser, and
a factor of 100 higher than most atomic or ionic lasers. That makes CO2 the gas laser of choice when
power is important. Applications including burning date codes or other identication on plastic bottles,
cutting sheet metal, or even cutting the special glass used in cell phone displays.
In the mid-1960s, the AVCO Everett Research Laboratory produced record continuous CO2
output of 50 kW, shown in Fig. 7. This gas-dynamic laser burned fuel at high temperature
Fig. 7. An experimental
gas-dynamic CO2 laser
developed by AVCO
Corporation circa 1968. The
output was over 50 kW.
92
(2000F) and pressure (20 atm.) and then exhausted the mixture of 89% nitrogen, 10% CO2 and 1%
water vapor through a supersonic expansion nozzle. This produced a CO2 population inversion
downstream, which could oscillate when passed through an optical cavity. The black circle above and
to the right of the technicians head was the beam output. The combustion chamber is at the right of the
device, and the exhaust to the atmosphere is to the left of the picture. (The combustion exhaust was
relatively harmless to the environment, but the highly poisonous cyanogen C2N2 was used as fuel to
keep the exhaust low in hydrogen, so extreme care was needed to make the fuel burn properly.) Later, a
400-kW version was installed in the Airborne Laser Laboratory, a laser-weapon testbed built in the
1970s.
Hydrogenuoride (HF) chemical lasers, which burn hydrogen and uorine to produce HF gas that
lases in a system similar to the gas-dynamic laser, have reached megawatt-class powers in demonstrations on the ground. These are described by Jeff Hecht in his chapter on laser weapons.
Summary
The two decades ending in the 1980s were the heyday of gas laser development. Today, the world of gas
lasers is much quieter, with only a few types remaining, with mostly carbon dioxide in the factory and
some excimers and argon ion lasers in ophthalmologists ofces.
A list of literature citations for the thousands of gas lasers implied by this chapter would be longer
than the chapter itself. The interested reader is referred to guides to that literature, such as [1].
Reference
1. R. J. Pressley, ed., Handbook of Lasers (CRC Press, 1971 and subsequent editions).
93
19601974

Jeff Hecht
he narrow-emission bandwidth of laser light quickly attracted the attention of spectroscopists in the early 1960s, but that narrow linewidth came at a costthe wavelength
was xed. Laser researchers found that they could shift the xed wavelength somewhat
by applying magnetic elds to the laser, they developed tunable parametric oscillators, and
eventually they found a few laser lines that were tunable. But those arrangements were
cumbersome and their range limited. As a student in the mid-1960s, spectroscopist Theodor
Hnsch felt a sense of frustration that he had no way to tune lasers to wavelengths that were
interesting.
What spectroscopists really wanted was a laser that could be tuned across a broad range of
interesting wavelengths. The rst such tunable laser, the organic dye laser, was discovered by
accident in research on Q-switching ruby lasers. The rst Q switches were active devices based on
Kerr cells or rotating mirrors, but in early 1964 the rst passive Q switches were developed using
saturable absorbers. Later that year, Peter Sorokin at the IBM Watson Research Center showed
that certain organic dyes dissolved in solvents made simpler and more convenient saturable
absorbers.
After that success, Sorokin found himself with a large collection of dye compounds that had
been prepared for the saturable absorber experiments. The dyes had interesting properties
including strong uorescence, so he decided to try producing stimulated Raman scattering. He
red pulses from a big Korad ruby laser into a dye that had never been tested in Q switching. The
rst experiment produced a black smudge on a photographic plate, but it was late Friday
afternoon and he had to leave. Monday morning, 7 February 1966, he told his assistant Jack
Lankard they should try aligning a pair of mirrors with the dye cell before they red the laser
again. Jack came back from developing the plate with a big grin on his face. There was one place
in the plate that the emulsion was actually burnt, Sorokin later recalled. They knew it was laser
action because the bright line was at the peak of the dye uorescence
Word of their experiments traveled slowly; Sorokin chose to publish his results in the
March 1966 issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development because he liked the
editor, but it was not widely read. That gave two other groups a chance to independently invent
the dye laser.
The idea of a dye laser came to Mary Spaeth, then at Hughes Aircraft Co., about the same
time Sorokin was working on his experiment. She recalls, I was sitting on my bed with my two
year old daughter on my lap, two months pregnant with my second daughter, and about 20
papers spread out in front of me. I had been studying dyes that had been used for many years
for photographic purposes. In particular, I was studying models for how they are excited and
how they transfer energy from one molecule to another in the photographic process. The
excited states of these dyes have a geometry very similar to their ground states, so they have
very strong absorption spectra. I suddenly realized that if a dye could be put in a suitable
solvent, you could have an enormous population inversion after illumination by a short-pulse
laser. It was just like the light bulb pictures you see in the funny books. Boing! There it was,
clear as day.
She also realized that because dyes have huge numbers of rotational states, they should have
a broad gain bandwidth, so that placing dispersive optics in a laser cavity with the dye solution
should allow wavelength tuning. But rst she wanted to try exciting the dye with pulses from a
94
ruby laser. It was not part of her job, so it

took her months to make arrangements to
pump dyes with a ruby laser in Dave
Bortfelds lab. As she sat epoxying a dye
cell together, Bortfeld entered the room
and threw a paper airplane at her. She
recalls, I looked at him to try to gure
out why he had done that. As I unfolded
the airplane, I found it was a copy of
Sorokins paper, which Bortfeld had
just spotted. She knew the dyes, so she
instantly realized what it was about. We
decided, what the heck, we were working
independently, and we continued on
our way.
Expecting the dye to emit at a wavelength a little longer than 700 nm, she did
Fig. 1. Peter Sorokin with the ashlamp-pumped dye
not set up a detector, guring she would be
laser in 1968. (Courtesy of International Business Machines,
International Business Machines Corporation.)
able to see the laser spot on a magnesium
oxide block. However she didnt see anything. I was about eight months pregnant, I had trouble reaching the knobs on the oscilloscope, it was
7 in the evening, and I was very tired, she recalls. Bortfeld told her to go home, while he set up a
photodetector and tried again. He called later that evening to tell her it had worked.
In further tests, they changed dye cells and moved their optics and found the oscillation
wavelength of one dye changed from 761 to 789 nm when they tried cells from 8 mm to 10 cm
long, and mirror spacing from 10 to 40 cm. They sent a paper to Applied Physics Letters, which
received it 11 July 1966 and published it in the 1 September issue. It was the rst report to show that
dye laser wavelength could be changed, although it was not yet practical tuning. Spaeth did not get
the chance to explore tuning further. Hughes management had no interest in dye lasers, and she had a
difcult childbirth, so her immediate priorities became recovering and dealing with two small
children.
Fritz Schaefer wrote that his group at the Max Planck Institute in Germany was unaware of either
effort when they stumbled upon the dye laser while studying saturation in a different group of organic
dyes. A student was testing the effects of increasing the dye concentration by ring ruby pulses into
the solution, Schaefer wrote, when he obtained signals about one thousand times stronger than
expected, with instrument-limited risetime[s] that at a rst glance were suggestive of a defective cable.
Very soon, however, it became clear that this was laser action. They may have learned of Sorokins
work after submitting a paper on their results which Applied Physics Letters received on 25 July, two
weeks after Spaeths paper. (After revisions received by APL on 12 September, Schaefers paper was
published in the 15 October 1966 issue, citing Sorokins paper but not Spaeths.) Like Spaeth, they
reported wavelength changes, in their case arising from changes in dye concentration.
Sorokin soon demonstrated ashlamp pumping, shown in Fig. 1, which proved important because
it could pump dyes across a broader range of wavelengths than the ruby laser. In 1967 Bernard Soffer
and Bill McFarland at Korad replaced one cavity mirror with an adjustable diffraction grating to make
the rst continuously tunable dye laser. They tuned across 40 nm and also reduced emission linewidth
by a factor of 100. At last, spectroscopists had a broadly tunable laser, and they soon were busy
exploring the possibilities.
Triplet-state absorption in the dyes limited pulse duration to nanoseconds in those early pulsed
lasers, but in 1969 Ben Snavely from Eastman Kodak and Schaefer found that adding oxygen to the
solvent could quench triplet absorption. Snavely then teamed with Kodak colleagues Otis Peterson and
Sam Tuccio to develop a continuous-wave (CW) dye laser. They rst investigated prospects for
pumping with intense plasma light sources, then tried pumping with an argon-ion laser. That required
longitudinal excitation and liquid ow to keep the dye solution cool, deplete triplet states, and avoid
95
thermal lensing. In 1970, they produced CW output

of about 30 mW at 597 nm when pumping a dye
solution owing between a pair of dichroic mirrors
with a 1-W argon-ion laser.
Further renements followed. Trying to increase CW dye output by increasing the pump
power and focusing it onto a smaller spot tended
to burn the coatings off the quartz windows covering the dye. That problem was solved when Peter
Runge and R. Rosenberg at Bell Labs developed a
way to ow a jet of dye solution through the pump
beam in a laser cavity without conning it, so there
was no glass or coating to be damaged.
Pulsed dye lasers had launched tunable laser
spectroscopy. CW dye lasers and higher powers led
to a series of landmark experiments. Conger Gabel
Fig. 2. Mary Spaeth at Livermore. (Courtesy of
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)
and Mike Herscher at Rochester reached tunable
single-mode dye power of 250 mW between 520
and 630 nm and used intracavity harmonic generation to produce tunable ultraviolet power of up to
10 mW. Felix Schuda, Herscher, and Carlos Stroud at Rochester stabilized a CW dye laser to 10 to
15 MHz to measure a the hyperne absorption spectrum of the sodium D line, showing that dye lasers
could do important experiments in fundamental physics.
Spectroscopy with CW dye lasers advanced rapidly. Two-photon Doppler free spectroscopy with
dye lasers, which allows extremely precise wavelength measurement, was developed independently in
1974 by David Pritchard at MIT and by Arthur Schawlow and Theodor Hnsch at Stanford.
CW operation of broadband dyes also opened the way to ultrashort laser pulses. In 1964, Willis
Lamb had showed that mode locking could generate extremely short laser pulses with duration limited
by the Fourier transform of the laser bandwidth. As long as laser bandwidth was limited, mode locking
could not generate very short pulses. However, with suitable optics a CW dye laser could oscillate
across most of the dyes emission bandwidth, allowing mode locking to generate ultrashort pulses. In
1972, Erich Ippen and Charles Shank generated 1.5-ps pulses by passive mode locking of a dye laser, and
in 1974 they generated subpicosecond pulses with kilowatt peak power. That launched the growth of
ultrafast technology, described in a later section by Wayne Knox.
As Schawlow wrote in the speech he gave when receiving the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics,
spectroscopy with the new [laser] light is illuminating many things we could not even hope to explore
previously. One of the amazing things was the small shifts of transition wavelengths between different
isotopes of elements such as uranium. Tunable narrow-line dye lasers could resolve those shifts, offering
the possibility of selectively exciting the ssionable isotope U-235. As described in another article in this
section, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used banks of dye lasers, pumped by large
copper-vapor lasers, to enrich both uranium and plutonium. At Livermore, Spaeth (Fig. 2) found
support for her interest in dye lasers, and managed development of massive CW dye lasers that
generated kilowatts for Livermores uranium-enrichment demonstrations.
96
19601974
David Hardwick
t was a cold February morning in Minnesotareally cold! The year was 1963 at the
Honeywell Research Center, and the author, only recently graduated from college, helped
some visitors bring in their product to demonstrate. Herb Dwight, one of the ve founders of
Spectra-Physics, and Gene Watson, their star salesman, had stayed overnight in Minneapolis and
left their laser in the back of a station wagon. When their Model 110 HeNe laser was brought
into the lab, steam was pouring off every surface, betting the change from below zero to room
temperature. The unit was turned on and, miracle of miracles, a sharp red 632.8-nm beam
emerged. It does not seem like much now, but the author was blown awayhaving only too
recently tried to build such a laser himself. With the optics of the time and his limited
understanding of the process, achieving the necessary alignment proved difcult indeed. And
here were these guys, tanned by the California sun and braving the frigid temperatures, showing
us pallid northerners in the depth of winter a commercial product that worked.
Some months later, convinced that he wanted to join the world of lasers, the author headed
west to join the company. Just before he set out, a call came in requesting that he stop at the JILA
lab in Boulder, Colorado, to demonstrate a laser to Dr. John Hall, a future Nobelist. That laser,
drop shipped to the author in Denver, did not work. It turned out that the power supply on
switch was not wired in and the author was too clueless to determine the problem. The next day
another laser arrived and was demonstrated to Dr. Hall and his staff, thus completing the
authors rst sales call.
Early Spectra-Physics lasers consisted of a tube lled with a HeNe gas mixture at a pressure
of a few Torr placed in an optical cavity with mirrors at either end and a power source, which
was radio-frequency (RF) coupled into the gas. Radio-frequency coupling avoided the necessity
of placing anodes and cathodes in the tube itself; cathodes available at the time quickly
deteriorated, and the tube would go from a healthy pink glow to a sickly bluedeath by gas
poisoning!
The Model 130 was introduced in 1963, a foot-long ten-pound laser that looked for all the
world like a lunch box complete with leather handle. Cost considerations demanded that DC
power be used instead of RF coupling. The tube was terminated with optical windows set at
Brewsters angle, and the confocal mirror cavity was protected from the outside world with
exible rubber boots. The problem was the cathodes were borrowed from neon sign
technology and were designed for use at pressures 10 that of the laser tube. These little metal
tubes, terminated with a ceramic disc and lled with some rare-earth oxide mixture, simply did
not last very long; the neon was quickly sputtered away, and a few-hundred-hour lifetime was
considered good. What to do?
The authors bosses, Arnold Bloom and Earl Bell, asked him to follow up on a paper by Urs
Hochuli of the University of Maryland in College Park describing aluminum cathodes for use in
HeNe lasers. This assignment led to the authors rst real project at Spectra. A visit to Hochuli
in College Park resulted in Spectras machine shop fabricating a few aluminum cathodes, tubes
a few inches long and an inch in diameter, allowing some HeNe tubes to be made. The results
were very promising. So promising, in fact, that in a few months, the neon sign cathodes were
abandoned and only aluminum cathodes were used. Some 50 years have passed, HeNe lasers
are still being manufactured, and to the authors knowledge aluminum cathodes remain the
standby.
97
That technology became the Model 130, which had quite a long life as a Spectra product. Early
devices delivered about 0.5 mW at 632.8 nm; they cost $1525, a solid value at the time, although today
a laser pointer producing much more power can be purchased for a few dollars. The Model 130 found
many applications, ranging from serving as a pointer in Arthur Schawlows lecture room to guiding a
gigantic borer with a ten-foot-diameter cutting face in a tunnel being drilled through a hillside in
Llanelli, Wales.
Spectra-Physics was a wonderful place to grow up in the laser world. The ve founders provided
leadership, presented real opportunities to those younger and dumber, and created an enjoyable work
environment. As an example, when it came time to crate the hundredth laser for shipment, work was
halted, a keg of beer was produced, signicant others were invited, and the factory oor witnessed a
party celebrating the event. Now, when millions of lasers in thousands of different congurations are
produced worldwide, it is fun to remember when coherent light was rare and customers clamored for
the rst chance to employ it in their experiments.
Spectra-Physics was also a place where the workdays seemed to run on foreverit was the
employees choice to work overtime, not a company demand. The author recalls ddling in his lab late
one night in 1964 when Earl Bell, a company founder, called out and asked him to come next door to
his lab. He had a three-meter-long, large-diameter laser tube attached to a vacuum system and tted
with various gas sources. As usual, he was experimenting with different gases to investigate their laser
potential. There was a very bright beam coming out of the tube and Earl asked what color it was. The
answer was obviousa very intense green! Earl said, I thought so but couldnt really tell as I am quite
color blind! Thus the author was the second person, after Earl, to see an ion lasera mercury-ion
laser. The gain was amazingEarl took a Kennedy half-dollar out of his pocket and held it in the mirror
position at the end of the tube, and the laser ickered on and off as he brought the mirror into
alignment.
After Earls discovery, Bill Bridges at Hughes built a pulsed argon-ion laser. Earl quickly followed,
and soon the continuous wave argon-ion laser, now ubiquitous, came on the scene. Spectra quickly
commercialized it with the refrigerator-sized Model 135 argon-ion laser and power supply. Only a few
dozen were made; they were RF-coupled, temperamental, and short-lived. The author remembers many
miserable days at a Paris university trying to coax usable power out of one of these monsters during the
dog days of August 1968, when all the more intelligent Parisians had left town for the seaside.
Spectra-Physics actively sought to sell their lasers in Europe from very early days. They employed a
salesman stationed in Switzerland who visited universities and company laboratories, selling many
large HeNe lasers at prices favorable to the company. However, there was a problem: European
countries had rm tariff barriers that greatly increased the costs of buying American lasers. The solution
was to set up manufacturing inside the tariff borders. When Herb Dwight asked if anyone was
interested in setting up such an assembly operation, the author quickly volunteered and, in a couple of
months, moved to Scotland with his small family to do so, choosing a site in Glenrothes Fife, just north
of Edinburgh. With the help of the Spectra team, friends of Herb at the local Hewlett-Packard factory,
Scottish government representatives and a host of others, Spectras rst Scottish-built Model 130 was
shipped three months later, in late 1967. During three years based in Scotland, the team demonstrated
and sold Spectra lasers throughout Europe, from nearby England to far-off Athens and north to
Stockholm. It was a great adventure!
Back to Mountain View, California, and the author had a new assignment to be product manager
for the Spectra-Physics Geodolite Laser Distance Rangender, working with Ken Ruddock, one of the
ve company founders. The Geodolite was based on a 25-mW HeNe laser that was amplitude
modulated at ve different frequencies while the return from the target was phase-detected. A one-inch
telescope broadcast the beam, and an eight-inch Cassegrain telescope gathered the return signal.
The team used the Geodolite for several ground-based and aerial applications, including ice
roughness measurement and wave height determination from various air platforms including a
Lockheed TriStar, Convair 990, and Douglas DC-3. For the author, it was the travel gig of a lifetime.
He was was in Barbados with the BOMEX project and a NASA team when Neil Armstrong landed on
the moon. Unfortunately, there was no live television feed to the island, so the team listened on the radio
and celebrated with the local brew! As an aside, the very next day Thor Heyerdahl pulled into
98
Bridgetown Harbor after having been rescued from the failed Ra rafting attempt across the Atlantic,
and the team was there to greet him. Other remote sites visited with the Geodolite included Ireland, the
Shetland Islands, Hawaii, the north slope of Alaska, and Brazil. On the ground, the team used the
Geodolite to survey in the primary markers for the Batavia, Illinois, accelerator.
Ken Ruddock was a great director and a lot of fun to work with. The Spectra team was testing the
Geodolite in airborne applications using the open cargo bay of a rented DC-3 on a hot day ying over
the central California valley. Unfortunately, the plane was owned by a chicken raiser, who used it to
ship many thousands of baby chicks from his farm to customers located all over the western United
States. These chicks leave a powerful odor, which was endured for many ight hours, but there was
compensation: the team was on one of those ights the day Spectra-Physics became a public company.
Ken turned to the author and said, I think I have just become a millionaire!
The author also worked for Bob Rempel, a founder and our rst president. Bob was a Ph.D.
physicist by degree but a tinkerer and mechanical engineer in his heart. He had strong ideas as to how
products should be built and expected all those in his sway to follow his lead. The authors favorite
vignette about Bob was his deep love of the Allen head bolt. Such fasteners were used in every possible
conguration in all Spectra products. Of course, to use such a bolt, one needed to have the correct Allen
head driver on hand. Somehow they were never at hand, and this dearth of drivers drove Bob up the
wall. One day, in a t of pique, he showed up in the lab areas with many boxes of these small drivers
and scattered them loosely over every conceivable work surface. With a satised smile, he took his
leave, saying as he left, there, that should x the problem!
Life at Spectra-Physics was full, challenging, and instructional. The author worked at one time or
another for each of the ve founders. Though young and dumb, he was treated as an equal partner and
was generously given the right to make mistakes and the encouragement to contribute ideas and energy
to build a successful Spectra-Physics. The founders of Spectra-Physics are owed a debt of gratitude that
cannot be fully paid off.
99
19601974
The Birth of the Laser Industry:

Overview
Jeff Hecht
ompanies large and small began making lasers after Ted Maiman announced the ruby
laser. The big companies had large industrial research laboratories and the resources
needed to develop a new technology. The little companies, many formed after Maimans
report, had energy, enthusiasm, and exibility. Both would play important roles in the laser
industry.
Money, expertise, and military contracts gave some companies a head start. Hughes Aircraft
started with Maimans design, as well as an Air Force contract to develop laser radars and
rangenders. The much smaller Technical Research Group already had an ARPA contract to
develop lasers based on Gordon Goulds patent applications and were the rst outside group to
replicate Maimans laser. Bell Labs had a formidable laser research group. Other big companies
including American Optical, IBM, General Electric, Raytheon, Varian, and Westinghouse began
investigating lasers, with their own funds or with military contracts.
American Optical, Hughes, and Raytheon became important early laser manufacturers, but
most other big companies never made many lasers. As part of the AT&T regulated phone
monopoly, Bell Labs had to license its patents. GE, IBM, Varian, and Westinghouse focused on
other products.
A wave of small companies also set out to build lasers. Maiman left Hughes to found a laser
group at a short-lived company called Quantatron in Santa Monica. When Quantatrons backers
soured on lasers, Maiman founded Korad Inc. with investment from Union Carbide and key
people from Hughes and Quantatron. Lowell Cross, Lee Cross (no relation), and Doug Linn left
the University of Michigans Willow Run Laboratory in 1961 to establish Trion Instruments Inc.
in Ann Arbor to build ruby lasers they had developed while at Michigan. Narinder Kapany
added lasers to the product line of Optics Technology, which he founded in 1960 to make optical
bers and other optical equipment.
Several books and articles, listed below, tell about the early days of laser development. In the
essays that follow, two industry veterans recount their adventures as young men working in the
very young laser industry in the early 1960s.
Bibliography
1. J. L. Bromberg, The Laser in America 19501970 (MIT Press, 1991).
2. J. Hecht, Lasers and the glory days of industrial research, Opt. Photon. News 31, 2027
(2010).
3. T. Maiman, The Laser Odyssey (Laser Press, 2000).
4. R. Waters, Maimans Invention of the Laser: How Science Fiction Became Reality (CreateSpace
Independent Publishing Platform, 2013).
100
19601974
Lasers at American Optical and

Laser Incorporated
Bill Shiner
merican Optical (AO) entered the laser business early through its interests in optical
glass and optical bers. Elias Snitzer, whom AO had hired to work on ber optics, made
the rst glass laser in 1961 by doping glass with neodymium, drawing it into a long, thin
rod and cladding the rod with lower-index glass to guide light along the rod by total internal
reection, just as in an optical ber.
The author started at AO in 1962 as a technician working for the companys chief
metallurgist, George Granitsis, who was investigating potential use of lasers for welding. They
were in the same building in Southbridge, Massachusetts, as Eli Snitzer, so the author also was
assigned the task of testing new laser glasses for Eli. Everyone was excited about lasers, and the
author remembers AO putting out a press release touting that the company would become the
IBM of the laser industry.
Those were fun days. Glass was easier to make in large rods than other solid-state lasers, so
larger and larger powered lasers were made, such as the one Eli is working on in Fig. 1. When
Shiner worked in Elis laser lab, they had two big metal wastebaskets. One said Eli and one
said Bill. The ashlamps that pumped the glass lasers sometimes blew up, so when they
charged the power supplies for them, they put the wastebaskets over their heads in case the lamp
failed. When the lamps exploded, the glass would hit the metal wastebasket. These wastebaskets
were also the rst form of laser eye protection.
AO made the rst Sun-powered laser, using a huge mirror to focus sunlight onto a
neodymium-glass rod. AO produced the rst laser capable of ranging off the Moon with a
group from Harvard University, using a glass laser and an amplier. The company also had a lot
of early military contracts and for a time held the worlds record for producing the most energy in
a single laser pulse, 5000 J, which was classied at the time. The authors lab had glass lasers that
put out 1500 to 3000 J per pulse, and they had to pump the rod with many times that energy, as
the efciency was about 2% wall plug. The resulting heat caused thermal expansion that
sometimes blew up the glass rods. They also built the rst large glass oscillator-amplier systems
for KMS Fusion and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to use in the rst laser fusion
experiments back in the late 1960s.
The author also did some early medical laser applications work with Dr. Charles Koester,
some of which in retrospect was rather weird. He worked with a doctor at the Delaware
Veterans Hospital who was working on a new procedure to stop ringing in the ear that was
plaguing Vietnam veterans. The standard procedure was to drill a hole to the brain with the
patient alert and knock out brain audio receivers until the ringing stopped. Many times more
brain tissue was destroyed than required. The laser application was to map the cochlea of the
inner ear with a ber laser to knock out the receptors rather than to knock out the receivers in the
brain. Monkeys were trained to respond to sound by pulling on a lever when they heard a sound
at a certain frequency to avoid receiving a slight shock. This technique thus established a map of
the threshold of sound as a function of frequency for the monkey. The side of the monkeys face
was shaved, the diaphragm was folded back, and the ber laser was inserted in the inner ear of
the monkey. The procedure was to locate the ber laser at a precise location and re it to
eliminate a receptor. In the cochlea the receptors are at a precise location as a function of
101
frequency. After the procedure the monkey

was tested to determine which receptor was
eliminated. Many times as the diaphragm
was removed to reach the inner ear, the
seventh cranial nerve would be damaged,
creating distortion of the monkeys face.
The experiments went very well and the
Veterans hospital called in the press. Photos
were taken of the doctor, the monkey, the
laser, and the author.
The author was very proud of his
contribution to the project; the photos
went out over the Associated Press wire.
When he came back to AO he was called
into the presidents ofce, and the author
thought he was going to be congratulated
for his contribution. Instead, he almost got
Fig. 1. Elias Snitzer with glass laser. (Courtesy of the Snitzer
red. The company made eyeglasses, and
family.)
the company slogan was about products to
enhance and protect the physical senses: animal groups from all over the country were calling,
complaining about the photos showing the author with the poor monkey with a shaved head and
distorted face.
AO later bought a small company called Laser Incorporated in Briarcliff Manor, New York,
headed by Tom Polanyi, which had developed an industrial carbon dioxide laser. They moved the
personnel to Framingham, Massachusetts, and consolidated it with AOs laser group. However, like
most other large companies, AO found it hard to make enough money from lasers to generate a prot
and decided to close the laser division. At that time in June of 1973 the author was application manager
and Albert Battista was engineering manager in the AO Laser Division. The two of them teamed up and
purchased the business from AO and renamed it Laser Inc. They did quite well and grew sales to several
million dollars, making the company quite protable. In 1980 they sold Laser Inc. to Coherent, and it
became the most protable division of Coherent for the next three years.
This article was adapted from an interview by Jeff Hecht, 18 May 2012.
102
Lasers at American Optical and Laser Incorporated
19601974
Solid-State Lasers
William Krupke and Robert Byer
16 May 1960 marks the beginning of the laser era, in particular the era of the solid-state laser.
On this date Dr. Ted Maiman and his colleagues at the Hughes Research Laboratories in
Malibu, California, demonstrated the rst ever laser, a ruby laser. The work leading up to this
event is described elsewhere in this section, and in more detail in Joan Lisa Brombergs The Laser
in America, 19501970, published in 1991 [1]. Ruby would be the rst in a large family of solidstate lasers.
George F. Smith [2], a Hughes manager at the time, wrote the following: Maiman felt that
a solid state laser offered some advantages: (1) the relatively simple spectroscopy made the
analysis tractable, and (2) construction of a practical device should be simple. Maiman initially
considered making a gadolinium laser in a gadolinium salt, but soon turned to synthetic ruby, a
form of sapphire (Al2O3) doped with trivalent chromium ions, which he knew from his earlier
work on microwave masers.
Maiman resolved doubts about rubys quantum efciency, but producing a population
inversion was a problem because the laser transition terminated in the ground state. When he
calculated requirements for laser operation based on gain per pass and mirror reectivity, Smith
wrote, He concluded that the brightest continuous lamp readily available, a high pressure
mercury vapor arc lamp, would be marginal. A pulsed xenon ash lamp, on the other hand,
appeared promising.
Crucially, ruby offered a way to demonstrate the laser principle using commercially
available materials, a ruby crystal made for use in precision watches, and a helically coiled
ash lamp made for photography. Maimans success surprised many others working on the
laser. Looking back, Arthur L. Schawlow wrote, I was surprised that lasers were so easy to
make. Since they had never been made, it seemed likely that the conditions needed might prove
to be very special and difcult to attain. It was also surprising that the earliest laser was so
powerful [3]. He told Optics News [4], I thought if you could get it to work at all it might put
out a few microwatts or something like that, and here he was getting kilowatts.
Schawlow and others had realized the attractions of a solid-state laser, but had focused their
attention on continuous-wave (CW) lasers, which consisted of a four-level system, with the
lower laser level above the ground state. Maiman showed that pulsed operation could be easier
and could produce attractively high instantaneous power. His ruby laser was reproduced within
weeks at other labs, and use of his ashlamp-pumping approach quickly led to the demonstration of other solid-state lasers.
Peter P. Sorokin and Mirek Stevenson at IBM had been working on their own approach to
solid-state lasers at the IBM Watson Research Laboratory. In Sorokins words [5]: The most
valuable and stimulating aspect of the SchawlowTownes article [6] was the derivation of a
simple, explicit formula applicable to a general system, showing the minimum rate at which atoms
must be supplied to an excited state for coherent generation of light to occur. The formula showed
that this rate (actually a measure of the necessary pump power) was inversely proportional to the
longest time that uorescence from the excited state could be contained between the two cavity end
mirrors in the parallel-plate geometry proposed by Schawlow and Townes.
When Sorokin searched for suitable materials, he concentrated on those suitable for fourlevel laser action. Fluorite (CaF2) looked attractive as host material because of its optical quality,
so he searched the literature for suitable emission lines from ions doped into CaF2. Looking back,
103
he wrote, It was strongly felt that a

suitable ionic candidate should display
luminescence primarily concentrated in a
transition terminating on a thermally unoccupied state. It was also felt that there
should be broad, strong absorption bands
that could be utilized to populate the
uorescing state efciently with broadband incoherent light. These two requirements generally dene a four-level optical
pumping scheme.
His search found spectral data that
identied two promising four-level sys Fig. 1. Peter Sorokin and Mirek Stevenson adjust their
uranium laser at IBM. (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual
tems in CaF2: trivalent uranium and divaArchives, Hecht Collection.)
lent samarium. He and Stevenson ordered
custom-grown crystals of uranium- and
samarium-doped CaF2 grown by outside vendors, and started experimenting with them. Then hearing
Maimans results stimulated a change in course.
Sorokin recalled, We quickly had CaF2:U3+ and CaF2:Sm2+ samples still in hand fabricated
into rods with plane-parallel silvered ends, purchased a xenon ashlamp apparatus, and within a few
months time successfully demonstrated stimulated emission with both materials. The materials CaF2:U3+
and CaF2: Sm2+ thus became the second and third lasers on record. When cooled to cryogenic temperatures,
both systems operated in a striking manner as true four-level lasers. Threshold pumping energies were
reduced from that required for ruby by two or three orders of magnitude. Our demonstration of this
important feature stimulated subsequent intensive research efforts in several laboratories to nd a suitable
rare earth ion for four-level laser operation at room temperature. (See Fig. 1.)
Heavily-doped dark or red ruby (as opposed to the pink ruby used by Maiman) also has fourlevel transitions, on satellite lines arising from interactions of chromium atoms. In 1959, Schawlow had
recognized the lower levels could be depopulated at cryogenic temperatures, but did not pursue it for a
laser at the time. He and others returned to the system, and in February 1961, after the four-level
uranium and samarium lasers were reported, Schawlow and G. E. Devlin [7] and, independently, Irwin
Wieder and L. R. Sarles [8] reported achieving four-level laser action in the satellite lines of dark ruby at
cryogenic temperatures.
The trivalent neodymium ion, Nd3+, rst demonstrated in late 1961, proved to be the preferred ion
for constructing a room temperature four-level laser. L. F. Johnson and K. Nassau at Bell Telephone
Laboratories [9] rst demonstrated laser emission on that line in a neodymium-doped calcium
tungstate crystal. In the same year Elias Snitzer at American Optical Company [10] reported achieving
similar room temperature laser action in neodymium-doped glass. Interestingly, Snitzers laser was in a
glass rod clad with a lower-index glassa large-core optical berbut the importance of that
innovation would not be realized for many years. Not until 1964 did J. E. Geusic (Fig. 2) and his
colleagues at Bell Laboratories [11] report robust room temperature laser action in neodymium-doped
yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), the crystal destined to be the dominant solid-state laser material for
commercial and industrial laser applications to the present time.
Once rare earth ions were identied as a particularly fertile group of materials for near-infrared
and visible lasers because of their characteristically narrow-band uorescence transitions, an explosion
of demonstrations of optically pumped solid-state lasers ensued, beginning in 1963. Rare-earth ions
included the trivalent thulium, holmium, erbium, praseodymium, ytterbium, europium, terbium,
samarium ions, as well as divalent dysprosium and thulium ions; these ions were doped into a variety
of crystalline host materials. Z. J. Kiss and R. J. Pressley [12] give an excellent review of solid state laser
development up to 1966.
All of the early solid-state lasers described so far have relatively narrowband laser transitions
offering very limited spectral tunability. There also was growing interest in developing solid-state
104
Solid-State Lasers
Fig. 2. Joseph Geusic with a solid-state

laser and two amplier stages at Bell Labs.
(Reprinted with permission of Alcatel-Lucent
USA Inc. Bell Laboratories/Alcatel-Lucent USA
Inc., courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives,
Hecht Collection.)
lasers, preferably four-level lasers operating at room temperature, with broadband laser transitions
that would allow wide spectral tunability for scientic and commercial laser applications. The rst such
solid-state lasers were realized in 1963, when. L. F. Johnson, R. E. Dietz, and H. J. Guggenheim [13] of
Bell Telephone Laboratories identied divalent nickel, cobalt, and vanadium in magnesium uoride
crystals as four-level laser gain media for widely tunable lasers in the near-infrared spectral range. Peter
Moulton details the development of these and later tunable solid state lasers elsewhere in this section.
The ve or six years after Maimans successful demonstration were immensely fruitful for solidstate and other lasers, recalled Anthony Siegman of Stanford University. The eld was just exploding.
And it turns out if you look into it, essentially every major laser that we have today had actually been
demonstrated or invented in at least some kind of primitive form by 1966 (OSA Oral History Project,
May 2008).
The latter part of the 1960s and the 1970s saw the identication of many new crystalline host
materials doped with rare-earth and transition metal ions, described by A. A. Kaminskii [14]. Over the
same periods, the most promising of these solid-state lasers were developed technologically and
industrialized.
The next seminal advance in the history of solid-state lasers was replacing the pulsed or CW
discharge lamps used to pump the rst generation of solid state lasers with emerging semiconductor
light sources, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and later semiconductor laser diodes (LDs).
Lamps are inherently broadband pump sources, generally spanning the whole visible spectrum, so they
can pump many different materials, but solid-state laser materials have distinct pump bands, so
inevitably much of the light would not excite the laser transition. In contrast, LEDs have bandwidths of
about 20 nm, and laser diodes of about 2 nm. Adjusting the mixture of elements in a compound
semiconductor can shift the peak emission wavelength to match many absorption lines, such as the
808-nm absorption line of neodymium. As long as a suitable pump band is available, this generally
increases coupling of pump radiation to the laser gain medium and signicantly decreases deposition of
waste heat in the gain medium. Generally, diode lasers are preferred for their higher efciency and
output power.
Diode pumping has a long history. In 1964 R. J. Keyes and T. M. Quist [15] reported transversely
pumping a U3+:CaF2 crystal rod with a pulsed GaAs laser diode, with the entire laser enclosed within a
liquid helium-lled dewar. M. Ross [16] was the rst to report diode pumping of a Nd:YAG laser in
1968, using a single GaAs diode in a transverse geometry. Reinberg and colleagues at Texas
Instruments [17] used a solid-state LED to pump a YAG crystal doped with trivalent ytterbium at
cryogenic temperatures.
Early progress in diode laser-pumped solid-state lasers was limited by the need for cryogenic
cooling and by the low powers of the diode lasers. It was not until 1972, nearly a decade after the
pioneering experiments, that Danielmeyer and Ostermayer [18] demonstrated diode laser pumping of
Nd:YAG at room temperature. Room temperature CW operation was rst demonstrated in 1976.
Powers of diode-pumped solid-state lasers increased with the powers of the pump diodes and with the
development of monolithic arrays of phase-locked diodes in 1978.
Solid-State Lasers
105
Initial development of diode-pumped solid-state lasers centered on neodymium because the 808nm pump line was readily generated by gallium arsenide, the rst high-power diode material. Further
development of other compound semiconductors in the 900- to 1000-nm band allowed pumping of
erbium- and ytterbium-doped lasers.
Development of higher-power diodes also allowed end pumping of optical bers. Doped with
erbium, they became optical ampliers that powered the boom in long-haul ber-optic communications. Doped with ytterbium, they became high-power ber lasers used in a growing range of industrial
applications, as described in another chapter.
References
1. J. L. Bromberg, The Laser in America: 19501970 (MIT, 1991).
2. G. F. Smith, The early laser years at Hughes Aircraft Company, IEEE J. Quantum Electron. QE-20,
577584 (1984).
3. A. L. Schawlow, Lasers in historical perspective, IEEE J. Quantum Electron. QE-20, 558 (1984).
4. A. Schawlow, Bloembergen, Schawlow reminisce on early days of laser development, Optics News,
March/April 1983.
5. P. P. Sorokin, Contributions of IBM toward the development of laser sources1960 to present, IEEE
J. Quantum Electron. QE-20, 585 (1984).
6. A. L. Schawlow and C. H. Townes, Infrared and optical lasers, Phys. Rev. 112, 1940 (1958).
7. A. L. Schawlow and G. E. Devlin, Simultaneous optical maser action in two ruby satellite lines, Phys.
Rev. Lett. 6(3), 96 (1961).
8. I. Wieder and L. R. Sarles, Stimulated optical emission from exchange-coupled ions of Cr+++ in Al2O3,
Phys. Rev. Let. 6, 95 (1961).
9. L. F. Johnson and K. Nassau, Infrared uorescence and stimulated emission of Nd3+ in CaWO4, Proc.
IRE 49, 1704 (1961).
10. E. Snitzer, Optical maser action of Nd3+ in a barium crown glass, Phys. Rev. Lett. 7, 444 (1961).
11. J. E. Geusic, H. M. Marcos, and L. G. Van Uitert, Laser oscillations in Nd-doped yttrium aluminum,
yttrium gallium and gadolinium garnets, Appl. Phys. Lett. 4, 182184 (1964).
12. Z. J. Kiss and R. J. Pressley, Crystalline solid state lasers, Appl. Opt. 5, 14741486 (1966).
13. L. F. Johnson, R. E. Dietz, and H. J. Guggenheim, Optical laser oscillation from Ni2+inMgF2 involving
simultaneous emission of phonons, Phys. Rev. Lett. 11, 318 (1963).
14. A. A. Kaminskii, Laser Crystals, Vol. 14 of Springer Series in Optical Sciences (Springer-Verlag, 1981).
15. R. J. Keyes and T. M. Quist, Injection luminescent pumping of CaF2:U3+ with GaAs diode lasers,
Appl. Phys. Lett. 4, 50 (1964).
16. M. Ross, YAG laser operation by semiconductor laser pumping, Proc. IEEE 56, 19 (1968).
17. A. R. Reinberg, L. A. Riseberg, R. M. Brown, R. W. Wacker, and W. C. Holton, GaAs:Si LED pumped
Yb doped laser, Appl. Phys. Lett. 10, 11 (1971).
18. H. G. Danielmeyer and F. W. Ostermayer, Diode-pump-modulated Nd:YAG laser, J. Appl. Phys. 43,
29112913 (1972).
106
Solid-State Lasers
19601974
Semiconductor Diode Lasers:

Early History
Marshall I. Nathan
n 1958 Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes [1] published a seminal paper suggesting how
to extend maser action to the visible spectrum to make a laser. Only two years later in 1960
Ted Maiman [2] made the rst working laser by exciting R-line emission of ruby with a
ashlamp. Shortly thereafter Peter Sorokin and Mirek Stevenson [3] reported a four-level laser in
uranium-doped calcium uoride, which had a much lower excitation threshold, and Ali Javan [4]
reported the helium-neon gas laser, which used radio frequency (RF) excitation.
All these lasers suffered from inherent shortcomings, they were large, bulky, and very
inefcient at transforming excitation energy into coherent light. Overcoming these difculties
would be crucial because most applications of lasers require compact, highly efcient devices.
Semiconductors offered the possibility of high efciency and compactness, but it was by no
means obvious how to make a semiconductor laser. Many people proposed ideas, but there was
no experimental work. John von Neumann was the rst to suggest light amplication by
stimulated emission in a semiconductor in an unpublished paper in 1953 [5], ve years before
Schawlow and Towness groundbreaking paper. Von Neumann suggested using a p-n junction to
inject electrons and holes into the same region to achieve stimulated emission, but the scientic
community was unaware of his idea. In 1958, months before Schawlow and Townes, Pierre
Aigran also proposed stimulated emission from semiconductors in an unpublished talk [6]. At
about the same time N. G. Basov, R. M. Vul, and Yu. M. Popov [7] made a similar suggestion.
None of these ideas led to any experiments, perhaps because they did not specify what
semiconductor or structure or electronic transitions to use.
M. G. Bernard and G. Durafforg [8] then put forth a condition for lasing when electrons
dropped from the conduction band to the valence band: the difference between the quasi-Fermi
level of electrons in the conduction band, EFn, and that of the holes in the valence band, EFp, must
be greater than the photon energy (EFnEFp > h). More to the point, Basov and co-workers [9]
suggested that recombining electrons and holes could produce stimulated emission. However,
their work attracted little attention because they said nothing about the crucial matter of which
semiconductor to use.
W. P. Dumke [10] in early 1962 pointed out that indirect semiconductors such as silicon and
germanium would not work as lasers because the gain from conduction to valance band
transitions is not sufcient to overcome the loss from free carrier absorption, which is intrinsic
to the material. In contrast, the gain for interband transitions in direct materials such as GaAs is
large enough to overcome the loss. That prediction has stood up until the present time,
notwithstanding the work of Kimerling and co-workers [11] who made a laser in Ge, which
was made quasi-direct by stress caused by epitaxial growth on Si.
By far the most inuential work leading to the GaAs injection laser was the observation of
interband emission from forward biased GaAs p-n junctions at 900 nm at room temperature and
at 840 nm at 77 K. This was rst reported at the March 1962 American Physical Society Meeting
by J. I. Pankove and M. J. Massoulie [12]. At the same meeting Sumner Mayburg and co-workers
[13] presented a post-deadline paper claiming 100% emission efciency of 840 nm radiation
from a p-n junction at 77 K. However, their evidence was indirectthat the light at 840 nm was
visible to the eye, indicating that it was very intense, and its intensity was linear with injection
107
Fig. 1. IBM scientists

observe electronic
characteristics of their new
gallium arsenide direct injection
laser. From left to right: Gordon
J. Lasher, William P. Dumke,
Gerald Burns, Marshall I.
Nathan, and Frederick H. Dill, Jr.
The picture was taken on 1
November 1962. (Courtesy of
International Business
Machines Corporation,
International Business
Machines Corporation.)
currentand less than totally convincing. At about the same time D. N. Nasledov and co-workers [14]
in the Soviet Union reported about 20% line narrowing of the radiation from a forward biased GaAs
p-n junction. It was an interesting result but was not stimulated emission.
A few months later in June 1962 R. J. Keyes and T. M. Quist [15] presented direct evidence of the
high efciency of the GaAs p-n junction light at the Durham, New Hampshire, Device Research
Conference. They measured light intensity as a function of current with a calibrated light detector and
found near 100% efciency for the conversion of electrical energy to optical energy. This work got wide
attention, with an acount published the day after the conference presentation in The New York Times.
The management at several industrial research laboratories took notice, and activity in GaAs emission
increased substantially.
It was barely four months later that laser action in GaAs was reported at four separate
laboratories within ve weeks of one another. The rst two reports were published simultaneously
on 1 November 1962. R. N. Hall, G. E. Fenner, J. D. Kingsley, T. J. Soltys, and R. O. Carlson [16]
from General Electric in Schenectady, New York, had a received date 11 days before M. I. Nathan,
W. P. Dumke, G. Burns, F. H. Dill, Jr., and G. J. Lasher [17] from IBM in Yorktown Heights,
New York (see Figs. 1, 2, and 3). The GE paper was more complete in that it demonstrated an
actual laser structure, shown in Fig. 1(a) of that paper (not reproduced here). The laser oscillated in
the plane of the junction and emitted coherent light from the polished end faces. On the other hand
the IBM paper reported line narrowing in an etched diode. One and a half months later two more
108
Fig. 2.
Gunther Fenner, Robert N. Hall, and Jack Kingsley at GE Research & Development Laboratories with the
rst diode laser, which operated in the dewar that Kingsley is holding. (General Electric Research Laboratories,
courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Hecht Collection.)
papers from different laboratories were published: N. Holonyak, Jr., and S. F. Bevacqua [18]
from General Electric in Syracuse, New York, and T. M. Quist, R. H. Rediker, R. J. Keyes, W. E.
Krag, B. Lax, A. L. McWhorter, and H. J. Zeiger [19] from Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington,
Massachusetts.
All four lasers operated at 77 K in a pulsed mode with a pulse length of about 100 ns and a
repetition rate of about 100 Hz, and the emission of three of them was about 840 nm. The GE Syracuse
work was different from the others in that the laser light was visible, near 660 nm, and the laser material
was a semiconductor alloy, GaPAs. It was remarkable in that the GaPAs material was polycrystalline,
but still recombination radiation was so efcient that it lased. The IBM group achieved full-edged
pulsed laser operation at room temperature and continuous operation at 2 K in short order as reported
in several papers in the January 1963 issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development [2026].
A key advance of the IBM group was the rst use of cleaved ends of the lasers by R. F. Rutz and F. H.
Dill [27]. This greatly simplied the fabrication process.
The publication of the four papers from GE, IBM, and Lincoln Lab launched a tidal wave of
research activity on semiconductor lasers. Just about every industrial and government research
laboratory and many university laboratories initiated work in the area.
The threshold current density of early semiconductor lasers operating at 77 K was several thousand
A/cm2. The threshold current was so high that the laser could operate only under short (100 ns)
excitation. When the lasers [28] were cooled to 4.2 K, the threshold went down to less than 100 A/cm2
and the laser operated continuous wave (CW). As the temperature was increased, the threshold current
109
increased rapidly until at room temperature it

approached 105A/cm2. Work to reduce the threshold
current by improving the geometric structure and the
impurity doping prole proceeded. By heroic efforts
at heat sinking and optimizing the laser structure
limited CW operation was obtained at temperatures
as high as 205 K [29]. However, the high threshold
and the pulsed operation placed serious limitations
on the possible application of semiconductor lasers.
Much work needed to be done.
It was clear that poor guiding of the laser light
in the active region p-n junction caused the high
threshold. The light was spreading out into the
inactive regions of the structure, where it was
being lost to diffraction and being reabsorbed. The
guiding due to the population inversion was very
weak. Manipulating the junction prole improved
the situation some, but not enough to get to CW
operation at room temperature. Better guiding
could be obtained for modes perpendicular to the
p-n junction because of the larger cross-sectional
area. However the active region is so thin for this
direction of propagation that the overall gain would
be very low, and the losses in the unexcited regions
of the laser would be very large. At that time a laser
Fig. 3. Marshall I. Nathan. (Courtesy AIP Emilio
of this type was impractical.
Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.)
In 1963 Herb Kroemer [30] suggested that
improved guiding could be obtained by using different materials for the active layer and the adjacent
cladding layers, creating heterojunctions on either side of the active layer. This structure came to be
known as the double heterojunction laser. If the cladding layers had a lower index of refraction than the
active layer, the guiding would be improved substantially. This could be accomplished by using a
material with a higher energy gap for the cladding layers since the index decreases with increasing
energy gap. This index difference would be much larger, and hence, the wave guiding would be much
better in the heterojunctions than in a homojunction. Furthermore, the loss due to re-absorption of the
laser light in inactive cladding layers would be reduced because of the higher energy gap in the inactive
cladding.
One material choice Kroemer suggested was using Ge, an indirect semiconductor, as the active
layer and GaAs in the cladding layers. This is an excellent choice for crystal growth because Ge and
GaAs have the same lattice constant. With the direct gap in GaAs only 0.14 eV higher than the indirect
gap in Ge, Kroemer hoped the population in the direct gap material would be sufcient to get lasing.
This turns out not to be the case, although as mentioned earlier Kimmerling and co-workers [11] made
a Ge laser by using growth-induced stress to make the direct gap closer to the indirect gap.
Alferov and R. F. Kazarinov [31,32] in the Soviet Union had similar ideas for heterojunctions. They
made lasers with GaAs active regions and GaPAs cladding layers, but the lattice mismatch between the
two materials made their lasers polycrystalline so they had high-threshold current densities.
Clearly, what were needed were direct gap materials with sufciently different energy gaps so as to
provide a single crystal heterojunction with good mode guiding for the laser. This came in 1967 from
Jerry Woodall and Hans Rupprecht [33] at IBM, who were working on solar cells, where they wanted a
large energy gap to let more light into the p-n junction in smaller-gap material. Using the alloy system
AlGaAs, which has a good lattice match to GaAs, they made single-crystal AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunctions. They grew their crystals with liquid phase epitaxy, which had been invented by H. Nelson [34]
several years earlier and later became commercially important. They observed efcient electroluminescence. However, they did not apply their technique to lasers.
110
Fig. 4. Future Nobel Laureate Zhores Alferov (lower right) with colleagues (clockwise) Vladimir I. Korolkov,
Dmitry Z. Garbuzov, Vyacheslev M. Andreev, and Dmitriy N. Tretyakov, the group that made the rst CW diode laser.
(Zhores I. Alferov, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Hecht Collection.)
This was left to H. Kressel and H. Nelson [35], who in 1967 reported an AlGaAs/GaAs singleheterojunction laser (structure shown in Fig. 1(b) from that paper [not reproduced here]) with its active
region in the p-type region of the GaAs. Because of the improved guiding and reduced absorption of the
AlGaAs the lasers threshold current density was 8000 A/cm2, a factor of two to three times lower than
the best homojunction lasers at the time. Shortly thereafter similar work was done by Hayashi, Panish,
Foy, and Sumki [36,37], who obtained a threshold current density as low as 5000 A/cm2. However,
these results were not good enough to obtain CW operation at room temperature.
Room-temperature continuous operation would take a further advance, namely, the doubleheterojunction laser, shown in Fig. 1(c) from that paper (not reproduced here), in which the large-gap
AlGaAs material is on both sides of the junction, providing better mode guiding and reduced loss on
both sides of the junction. The heterojunctions also conne the electrons and holes to a thin region,
yielding higher gain. The rst double-heterojunction lasers were made by Alferov, Andreev, Portnoi,
and Trukan [38] in 1968. These lasers had threshold current density as low as 4300 but were not yet
CW. In 1969 Hayashi, Panish, and Sumski [36] reported the achievement of double-heterostructure
AlGaAs/GaAs lasers with a threshold as low as 2300 A/cm2 [39] By the following year (1970) they had
reduced the threshold down to 1600 A/cm2 and obtained CW operation at room temperature [40].
Alferovs group (see Fig. 4) achieved CW room temperature operation at about the same time in a
stripe-geometry laser [41].
At this point it was clear that the semiconductor laser was a device with many important
applications. Research and development toward this end have continued and expanded since then.
111
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ampliers of electromagnetic oscillations, Sov. Phys. JETP 10, 416417 (1959).
8. M. G. Bernard and G. Duraffourg, Laser conditions in semiconductors, Phys. Stat. Solidi 1, 699703
(1961).
9. N. G. Basov, O. N. Krokhin, and Yu. M. Popov, Production of negative-temperature states in P-N
junctions of degenerate semiconductors, Sov. Phys. JETP 13, 13201321 (1961).
10. W. P. Dumke, Interband transitions and maser action, Phys. Rev. 127, 15591563 (1962).
11. X. C. Sun, J. F. Lu, L. C. Kimerling, and J. Michel, Toward a germanium laser for integrated silicon
photonics, IEEE J. Select. Topics Quantum Electron. 16, 124131 (2010).
12. J. I. Pankove and M. J. Massoulie, Light-emitting diodesLEDs, Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 7, 8893
(1962).
13. Because it was a post-deadline paper, the abstract does not appear in the Bull. Amer. Phys. Soc. but was
subsequently published: J. Black, H. Lockwood, and S. Mayburg, Recombination radiation in GaAs,
J. Appl. Phys. 34, 178180 (1963).
14. D. N. Nasledov, A. A. Rogachev, S. M. Ryvkin, and B. V. Tsarenkov, Recombination radiation of
gallium arsenide, Sov. Phys. Solid State 4, 782784 (1962).
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emitted by gallium arsenide, Proc. IRE 50, 18221829 (1962).
16. R. N. Hall, G. E. Fenner, J. D. Kingsley, T. J. Soltys, and R. O. Carlson, Coherent light emission from
GaAs junctions, Phys. Rev. Lett. 9, 366368 (1962).
17. M. I. Nathan, W. P. Dumke, G. Burns, F. H. Dill, Jr., and G. Lasher, Stimulated emission of radiation
from GaAs p-n junctions, Appl. Phys. Lett. 1, 6264 (1962).
18. N. Holonyak, Jr., and S. F. Bevacqua, Coherent visible light emission from Ga1-xPx junctions, Appl.
Phys. Lett. 1, 8283 (1962).
19. T. M. Quist, R. H. Rediker, R. J. Keyes, W. E. Krag, B. Lax, A. L. McWhorter, and H. J. Zeiger,
Semiconductor maser of GaAs, Appl. Phys. Lett. 1, 9192 (1962).
20. G. J. Lasher, Threshold relations and diffraction loss for injection lasers, IBM J. Res. Devel. 7, 5861
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21. G. Burns, R. A. Laff, S. E. Blum, F. H. Dill, Jr., and M. I. Nathan, Directionality effects of GaAs lightemitting diodes: part I, IBM J. Res. Devel. 7, 6263 (1963).
22. R. A. Laff, W. P. Dumke, F. H. Dill, Jr., and G. Burns, Directionality effects of GaAs light-emitting
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Morosov, O. A. Ninoa, E. L. Portnoi, V. D. Prochukhan, and M. K. Trukan, Injection luminescence of
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laser diodes, RCA Rev. 24, 603615 (1963).
35. H. Kressel and H. Nelson, Close-connement GaAsp-n junction lasers with reduced optical loss at
room temperature, RCA Rev. 30, 106113 (1969).
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Quantum Electron. QE-5, 211212 (1969).
37. M. B. Panish, I. Hayashi, and S. Sumski, A technique for the preparation of low-threshold roomtermperature GaAs laser diode structures, IEEE J. Quantum Electron. QE-5, 210211 (1969).
38. Zh. I. Alferov, V. M. Andreev, E. L. Portnoi, and M. K. Trukan, AlAs-GaAs heterojunction injection
lasers with a low room-temperature threshold, Sov. Phys. Semiconduct. 3, 11071110 (1970).
39. M. B. Panish, I. Hayashi, and S. Sumski, Double heterostructure injection lasers with roomtemperature thresholds as low as 2300 A/cm2, Appl. Phys. Lett. 16, 326328 (1969).
40. I. Hayashi, M. B. Panish, P. W. Foy, and S. Sumski, Junction lasers which operate continuously at room
temperature, Appl. Phys. Lett. 17, 109110 (1970).
41. Zh. I. Alferov, V. M. Andreev, D. Z. Garbuzov, Yu. V. Zhilyaev, E. P. Morozov, E. L. Portnoi, and V. G.
Trom, Investigation of the inuence of the AlAs-GaAs heterostructure parameters on the laser
threshold current and the realization of continuous emission at room temperature, Fiz. Tekh.
Poluprovodnikov 4, 1826 (1970). (English version: Sov. Phys. Semiconduct. 4, 15731575 (1971).
113
19601974
Lasers and the Growth of

Nonlinear Optics
Jeff Hecht
onlinear optical effects were seen long before the laser was invented. In 1926, Russians
Sergey Vavilov and Vadim L. Levishin observed optical saturation of absorption when
they focused bright microsecond pulses to power densities of kilowatts per square
centimeter. Vavilov introduced the term nonlinear optics in 1944, and during World War II
Brian OBrien put saturation to practical use in his Icaroscope to spot Japanese bombers
attacking with the sun behind them. The bright coherent light from the laser opened new
possibilities.
Peter Franken (Fig. 1) realized them as he sat in packed sessions on lasers at OSAs spring
meeting in early March of 1961. His mind wandered as speakers droned about applications in
communications and eye surgery. Seeking something really unusual, he calculated the intensity
of a 5-kW laser pulse focused onto a 10-m spot. His answer was megawatts per square
centimeter, with electric elds of 100,000 V/cmonly three or four orders of magnitude below
the electric eld inside an atom.
I realized then that you could do something with it, Franken recalled in a 1985 interview
[1]. Further calculations showed the elds should be able to produce detectable amounts of the
second harmonic. Excited, he left the meeting and hurried back to the University of Michigan,
where he and solid-state physicist Gabriel (Gaby) Weinreich began planning an experiment. He
rented a ruby laser from Trion Instruments, a small Ann Arbor company that was the rst to
manufacture them, and got Wilbur Pete Peters to set up a spectrograph and camera for
measurements. Weinrich told him to re the laser into crystalline quartz, which can produce the
second harmonic because it lacks a center of inversion.
They needed a long time to get usable results. Alignment requirements were demanding, and
harmonic conversion was so inefcient that 3-J, 1-ms pulses containing about 1019 photons
yielded only about 1011 second harmonic photons. Nonetheless, their photographic plate clearly
showed the small second harmonic spot. They submitted their paper in mid-July, a little over
four months after the meeting, and it appeared in the 15 August Physical Review Letters
without the faint second harmonic spot, which an engraver had removed because it looked like a
aw in the photo [2].
Optical harmonic generation experienced a breakthrough in 1961. At that time, we were
all thinking photons, and you cant change the frequency of a photon, recalled Franken. But
working with Willis Lamb at Oxford University in 1959 had taught Franken that classical
electromagnetic wave theory applied to light, so he had realized that nonlinearities might
generate optical harmonics. The faint second harmonic spot that never made it into print
launched modern nonlinear optics.
Frankens results caught the eye of Joe Giordmaine, who just two months earlier had begun
exploring the effects of ruby laser pulses on various materials at Bell Labs. He began testing Bells
large stock of crystals left from World War II research and within a few weeks was seeing more
harmonic power than Franken had. When he tested crystals of potassium dihydrogen phosphate
(KDP) he was surprised to nd that second harmonic emission was not just in the direction
of the ruby beam, but in a ring centered on a different direction, and that the second harmonic
was many times higher at some angles than others. He had discovered the importance of phase
114
matching the fundamental and second harmonic

beams. It did not work in quartz, but it did in
birefringent crystals such as KDP. Bob Terhune
independently discovered phase matching at the
same time at the Ford Motor Co. Research
Laboratory.
At Harvard, Nicolaas Bloembergen (Fig. 2)
gathered John Armstrong, Peter Pershan, and Jacques Ducuing to work on nonlinear optics after he
saw a preprint of Frankens paper. Armstrong and
Ducuing began experiments, and all four worked on
theory. Bloembergen wrote the differential equations describing harmonic generation, but solving
the nonlinear problems posed a formidable task.
The group spent several intense and exciting months
from July 1961 to early 1962, dividing the task
among themselves and working closely with
Bloembergen.
The result was a 22-page detailed analysis of
light interactions in nonlinear dielectrics, published
in Physical Review in September 1962 [3]. It was
by no means the last word, but it was a very complete
Fig. 1. Peter Franken. (OSA Historical Archives.)
rst word, says Armstrong, whose name was rst
in alphabetical order. The codication of nonlinear
interactions including harmonic generation and
parametric conversion had a huge impact in the
young eld.
Meanwhile, experiments with high-power, single-pulse Q-switched ruby lasers at Hughes Aircrafts Aerospace group revealed an unexpected
nonlinear anomaly. In early 1962, Eric Woodbury
and Won Ng measured output power at several
hundred megawatts, far more than expected, when
they used a Kerr-cell Q-switch lled with nitrobenzene. Puzzled, they did other experiments, but the
light nally dawned when measured power dropped
to the expected level after they inserted narrow-pass
lters centered on the 694.3-m ruby line. Further
measurements revealed unexpected light on three
near-infrared lines, the strongest at 766 nm, a
weaker one at 851.5 nm, and a barely detectable
line at 961 nm. The increments were roughly equal
in frequency units.
They reported what they thought was a new
type of laser action, but it was up to Robert
Fig. 2. Nicolaas Bloembergen. (Photograph by
Hellwarth and Gisela Eckhardt of Hughes ReNorton Hintz, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual
search Labs to suggest the infrared lines were
Archives, Hintz Collection.)
coming from stimulated Raman scattering by the
nitrobenzene in the Q-switch. Experiments quickly
conrmed that, and Hellwarth later developed a full theoretical model. It was a landmark discovery in
nonlinear optics, showing that light interacted with molecular vibrations to stimulate scattering at
Stokes-shifted wavelengths. Soon afterward, Terhune and Boris Stoicheff separately observed antiStokes emission.
115
Charles Townes, then at MIT, analyzed

Stoicheffs results and wondered whether lasers
could also stimulate Brillouin scattering. In just two
weeks, graduate student Ray Chiao, Townes, and
Stoicheff used a ruby laser to demonstrate Brillouin
scattering in a solid. Soon another student, Elsa
Garmire, demonstrated Brillouin scattering in a
liquid. It took years to work out the details, and
in 1972 Boris Ya. Zeldovichthe son of noted
Soviet nuclear physicist Yakov B. Zeldovich
showed that stimulated Brillouin scattering could
produce phase conjugation.
Townes suggested another research direction
after seeing thin laments of optical damage in glass
exposed to Q-switched megawatt pulses from a
ruby laser (see Fig. 3) by Michael Hercher of the
University of Rochester. Townes suspected that
optical nonlinearities were self-trapping the beam
and with Chiao and Garmire described how the
intense beam changed the refractive index to create
a waveguide. At the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Paul
Kelley developed a theory of self-focusing showing
scale lengths and the effects of beam power. Unknown to U.S. researchers, Vladimir Talanov was
working on the same idea in the closed Soviet city of
Gorky.
Rem V. Khokhlov and Sergey A. Akhmanov
founded Russias rst nonlinear optics laboratory at
Moscow State University in 1962, but Cold War
tensions allowed little communication with American groups. During that year, they proposed a
theory to extend parametric oscillation from radio
frequencies to light, offering a way to generate
tunable output from xed-wavelength lasers.
Khokhlov and Akhmanovs Problems in Nonlinear
Optics was the rst book on the topic when it was
published in Russian in 1964, but it did not appear
in English until 1972. Bloembergens Nonlinear
Optics was published in 1965.
Fig. 3. Trace of damage caused by a Q-switched
The Moscow lab soon developed efcient
ruby laser pulse. (Courtesy of Courtesy of Michael
ways of generating second, third, fourth, and fth
Hercher.)
harmonics. A long series of experiments with
Alexander Kovrigin demonstrated an optical
parametric oscillator in the spring of 1965, at
nearly the same time Giordmaine (Fig. 4) and crystal expert Robert Miller demonstrated one at
Bell Labs. Both pumped with the second harmonic of neodymium lasers, with the Moscow lab using
KTP and Bell using lithium niobate as the nonlinear crystals. The experiments were difcult, and Bell
Labs achieved only 5% conversion efciency, but output was tunable across 70 nm, an impressive
gure in 1965.
Self-focusing led to self-phase modulation. When Kelley and MIT student Ken Gustafson studied
shock-wave generation in nonlinear materials, they found a phase shift that depended on the square of
the eld intensity. They did not make much of it at the time, but in 1967 Fujio Shimizu at the University
of Toronto demonstrated that self-phase modulation in liquids could spread the spectral bandwidth of a
116
Fig. 4.
David Kleinman and

Joe Giordmaine. (Courtesy of
AT&T Archives and History
Center.)
pulse [4]. In 1970 Bob Alfano and Stan Shapiro at GTE Laboratories in Bayside, New York,
demonstrated more frequency spreading in glass and crystals [5]. The higher the power, the broader
the bandwidth, and over the years the effect spread the spectrum enough to make white-light
supercontinua.
In 1973, Akira Hasegawa and F. Tappert took another important step, extending the concept of
self-trapping to describe optical temporal solitons in optical bers [6]. Nonlinear phase modulation and
dispersion interact such that pulse duration and frequency chirp increase and decrease cyclically along
the length of the ber, periodically reconstructing the original pulse. Hasegawa, Linn Mollenauer, and
others later showed that solitons could transmit signals through optical bers.
Modern nonlinear optics has come a long way from its roots, yet the fundamental groundwork
remains solid. To this day, every time I make a discovery in nonlinear optics, I look at [Bloembergens]
paper and hes done it, says Robert Boyd of Rochester. He put the whole eld together in 18
months. That feat earned Bloembergen the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Nonlinear optics is used in consumer products. Second harmonic generation turns the invisible
1.06-m line of neodymium into a bright 532-nm green beam. Its hard to believe you can buy these
things. If you think of whats inside, its just amazing, says Garmire. Harmonic generation also nds
cutting-edge laboratory applications, generating pulses of attosecond duration or with wavelengths in
the extreme ultraviolet or x-ray bands. Self-phase modulation together with mode locking produces
femtosecond pulses and frequency combs. The more we try to do with optics, the more we have to think
about nonlinearities. Like the laser that was essential to its birth and its applications, nonlinear optics
seems to be everywhere.
Note: This chapter was adapted from [7].
References
1. Peter Franken oral history interview, http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4612.html
2. P. A. Franken, A. E. Hill, C. W. Peters, and G. Weinreich, Generation of optical harmonics, Phys. Rev.
Lett. 7, 118120 (1961).
3. J. A. Armstrong, N. Bloembergen, J. Ducuing, and P. S. Pershan, Interactions between light waves in a
nonlinear dielectric, Phys. Rev. 127, 19181939 (1962).
117
4. F. Shimizu, Frequency broadening in liquids by a short light pulse, Phys. Rev. Lett. 19, 10971100
(1967).
5. R. R. Alfano and S. L. Shapiro, Observation of self-phase modulation and small-scale laments in
crystals and glasses, Phys. Rev. Lett. 24, 592594 (1970).
6. A. Hasegawa, Soliton-based optical communications: an overview, IEEE J. Select. Topics Quantum
Electron. 6, 11611172 (2000).
7. J. Hecht, How the laser launched nonlinear optics, Opt. Photon. News 21(10), 3440 (2010).
118
19601974

Jeff Hecht
he idea of holography came to Dennis Gabor while he was waiting for a tennis court on
Easter Day in 1947. Born in Hungary in 1900, Gabor had earned a Ph.D. in electrical
engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, then moved to Britain when Hitler
came to power. In 1947, he was working at the British Thoms-Houston Company in Rugby and
wondering how to improve the resolution of electron microscopes.
Waiting for his tennis match, he wondered how to overcome the imperfections in electron
optics that limited resolution. Why not take a bad electron picture, but one that contains the
whole information, and correct it by optical means? he recalled later. He rst thought of
illuminating an object with coherent electrons, so interference between electrons scattered from
the object and those not deected would record the phase and intensity of the wavefront. If he
recorded the interference pattern and illuminated it with coherent light, he thought he could
reconstruct the electron wavefront and generate a high-resolution image.
Lacking a way to record electron interference patterns, Gabor tried using light as a model,
although he had not worked with optics before. The best available coherent source at the time
was a high-pressure mercury lamp, but its coherence length was only 0.1 mm, and ltering it
through a pinhole left only enough light to make 1-cm holograms of 1-mm transparencies.
Nonetheless, he made recognizable holographic images in 1948 (Fig. 1), a dozen years before
Theodore Maiman made the rst laser.
Gabors report in Nature in 1948 [1] raised the possibility of three-dimensional (3D)
imaging, generating considerable attention, and helped him land a professorship at Imperial
College in London; but progress was slow, his design generated twin overlapping images, and the
short coherence lengths of available light sources limited imaging to small transparencies. By the
mid-1950s, Gabor and most others had largely abandoned holography.
The revival of holography grew from a completely independent direction: classied military
research on synthetic aperture radar launched in 1953 at the University of Michigans Willow Run
Laboratory. The following year, a young engineer named Emmett Leith who had studied optics
at Wayne State University began developing an optical system to perform Fourier transforms of
radar data collected by ying over the target terrain. He and Wendell Blikken started with incoherent
optics, but Leith later said many of their problems just melted away when they considered
coherent light in 1955. They did not need much coherence and they eventually found that focusing all
the light from a point source onto another point would sufce for radar processing.
In September 1955, Leith realized that the light waves diffracted from the data record were
replicas of the original radar signals converted to optical wavelengths. That led him to a theory that
mirrored Gabors wavefront-reconstruction holography but shrank the radio waves to optical
wavelengths rather than stretching electron waves to optical lengths. He knew nothing about other
research in holography until a year later, when he discovered a paper by Paul Kirkpatrick and
Hussein M. A. El-Sum in the Journal of The Optical Society of America (JOSA) [2].
Holography intrigued Leith, but the radar project kept him too busy to experiment until
1960, when Willow Run hired Juris Upatnieks as a research assistant in the optics group. Born in
Latvia in 1936, Upatnieks ed with his family when Soviet troops occupied Latvia in 1944. They
spent years as refugees in Germany before moving to the U.S. in 1951. He had a fresh degree in
electrical engineering from the University of Akron (Ohio) but lacked a security clearance, so he
could not work on the radar project.
119
Fig. 1.
Dennis Gabors rst hologram. (Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd.: Nature 1948.)
Leith put Upatnieks to work making

Gabor-style holograms while they waited
for his clearance. Despite lacking optics
experience, Upatnieks succeeded. The
reconstructed images were fascinating but
had the same twin-image problem as
Gabors.
However, Leiths theory of holography offered a crucial insight because it
described a signal modulating a carrier
wave, which produces sidebands at the
sum and difference frequencies, above and
below the carrier frequency. Leith realized
that Gabors twin images were the two
sidebands. Eliminating one of them should
leave a single clear image. (Figure 2 shows
them
with their holographic setup.)
Fig. 2. Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks in 1965. (Courtesy
Leith suggested separating the object
of Juris Upatnieks.)
and reference beams so that they reached
the photographic plate at different angles. However, that proved hard until they used a diffraction
grating to split light from a mercury-vapor lamp into different diffraction orders, and using one as the
reference beam and the other as the object beam. That yielded the rst off-axis holograms, and
Upatniekss experiments conrmed Leiths theory. Leith described the results at OSAs October 1961
meeting in Los Angeles and submitted a paper to JOSA [3].
By then, the military had called Upatnieks to fulll his obligations from ROTC in college. When he
returned to Willow Run in November 1962, he started a new round of holography experiments with a
mercury lamp, but an early commercial helium-neon laser was sitting temptingly in a nearby laboratory
where Anthony VanderLugt was using it in image-recognition experiments. Inevitably, as Upatnieks
says, We kind of talked him into letting us borrow his beam. We put a mirror in his room, and
bounced the beam off to our setup.
Based on a standard optical bench, their new setup expanded the laser beam and split it by
passing it through a wedge prism. Recording good holograms required extra-at glass plates that
Kodak had developed for spectroscopy. Exposure was very slow, so the lasers higher intensity was a
big advantage. Leith and Upatnieks reported a dramatic improvement in hologram quality at the
March 1963 OSA meeting in Jacksonville and in a paper in the December 1963 issue of JOSA [4]. The
holographic reconstruction of a 1.5-cm slide in the published version is hard to tell from the original.
Holographic reconstructions of slides of a child in an outdoor scene and an adult portrait are speckled
but clear.
Lasers brought speckle to holography, but their higher power and longer coherence length made
experiments easier. More important in the long run, laser coherence allowed fully 3D holography of
120
opaque objects. Leith and Upatnieks spent

a couple of days trying 3D holography in
July 1963 but failed and turned to other
work.
They returned to 3D holography after
the JOSA paper came out and reporters
asked Leith what might come next. He
offhand mentioned that 3D objects could
be recorded and they would be three dimensional, and no one believed it, Upatnieks recalled. Since Emmett said it
would be done, we had to show it, and
they went back to 3D holography.
They faced tough technical problems
such as isolating their holographic setup
Fig. 3. Iconic photo of holographic toy train. (Courtesy of
from wavelength-scale vibrations. Moving
Juris Upatnieks.)
to a massive granite optical bench improved image clarity, but the 3D images did not seem dramatic until Leith and Upatnieks started
using objects a few inches across, large enough for the eye to see as three dimensional. Holograms
recorded on 4- by 5-in. plates were incredible, just totally incredible, the one thing that excited us
most, Leith recalled.
Their rst image was a pile of loose objects they obtained from the laboratory; it looked like a pile
of junk, interesting only because it was a hologram. As they rened their technique, they found an iconic
object that made a striking holograman HO-gauge toy train engine that they lled with epoxy and
glued to the tracks to stabilize it (Fig. 3). They recorded two holograms on the same photographic plate
mounted at different angles, then reconstructed the two images separately without crosstalk by
illuminating the plate at the proper angles.
Visitors streamed through the lab to see the holograms, but the oodgates opened in April at OSAs
1964 spring meeting. Upatnieks presented a 15-minute paper on Friday afternoon, the last day of the
meeting, titled Lensless, three-dimensional photography by wavefront reconstruction, but the talk
could not match a demonstration. Attendees lined up in the hall to see a HeNe laser illuminate a
hologram in a hotel suite rented by Spectra-Physics. They stood and studied the holographic toy train
oating in space, then looked around to nd the hidden projector that was fooling them. Leith called
that the high point in the dissemination of holography [5].
The optics world was enchanted by holography, and specialists hurried home to try to make their
own holograms. Most failed on their rst attempts and called Leith and Upatnieks for help. Those calls
kept us quite busy for a while, but that was how holography took off, Leith recalled.
Enthusiasm spread fast, as it had for the laser. It was a boom time for technology, and, like the ruby
laser, holography could be duplicated in a well-equipped optics lab. Could holography be the problem
that the laser was searching to solve?
It took time to assimilate the concept. The rst issue of Laser Focus in January 1965 called it 3-D
lasography [6]. Others called it lensless photography or wavefront reconstruction. Scientic American
called its June 1965 article Photography by laser and showed two holographic chess pieces on the
cover [7]. Leith and Upatnieks used Gabors term, hologram. By any name, holography had potential.
Its images shimmering in mid-air looked so real that people reached out to touch them.
Among the burst of innovations in the holographic boom was the rediscovery of reection
holography invented by Yuri Denisyuk at the Vavilov State Optical Institute in the Soviet Union.
Instead of directing the object and reference beams onto the same side of the photographic plate,
Denisyuk illuminated the object through the plate, with the reected object light interfering with the
reference beam in the plane of the plate. He demonstrated the technique with mercury lamps; but his
experiments ended in 1961, and his two papers published in Russian in 1962 were ignored until three
American labs stumbled upon the effect independently in 1965. Importantly, Denisyuk reection
holograms can be viewed in white light.
121
Fig. 4.
Mini Kiss II: Pam Brazier in holographic stereogram. (Courtesy of MIT Museum. Mini Kiss II, Lloyd G.
Cross, 1975. http://web.museum.mit.edu/imagerequest.phpimagenumberMOH-1978.52.01 [all three views].)
Another major imaging advance came was the invention of rainbow holograms by Steve Benton
at Polaroid in 1969. Seeking to make brighter images, he produced reection holograms that displayed
depth only in the horizontal plane, the only one in which our eyes see parallax. This allows the
hologram to diffract the whole visible spectrum, spread across a range of angles to produce a rainbow
of colors. Easily visible under normal lighting, such holograms can be embossed onto metal lms and
they have become the most widely used holograms.
In the early 1970s in San Francisco, Lloyd Cross developed a variation on rainbow holography that
offered an illusion of motion. He produced the holograms in a two-stage process. First, he took
conventional photographic transparencies as he moved around a person or object, and then he recorded
rainbow holograms of the series of transparencies as successive narrow stripes on lm. Finally, the lm
was mounted in a 120-deg arc or a 360-deg cylinder.
The viewers eyes saw different frames, giving the parallax that the brain interprets as depth. If the
model moved between frames, a viewer saw the movement while moving around the curved hologram.
Cross formed a company called Multiplex to make the holograms; the best known one shows Pam
Brazier blowing a kiss to the viewer (Fig. 4).
In October 1971, when the holographic imaging boom was in full ower, Dennis Gabor received
the Nobel Prize for his invention and development of the holographic method. Many in the optics
community felt that Leith and Upatnieks should have shared the prize for reviving holography with
lasers and their solution of the twin image problem.
In his book Holographic Visions [8], science historian Sean Johnston blames George W. Stroke,
who in 1963 started a holography program on the Michigan campus that came to compete with Leiths
work at Willow Run. Stroke eventually left Michigan carrying a grudge and claiming that his work was
more important. This was long a common view in the optics community.
However, in her dissertation on the history of holography written at Cambridge University [9],
holographer Susan Gamble argues that the problem was that Leith and Upatnieks worked at a military
lab. Michigan students had protested Willow Runs military projects, and in 1971 opposition to the
Vietnam War was widespread in Europe. The Nobel committee may well have decided that awarding a
Nobel Prize for military work would send the world the wrong message.
If some optical Rip Van Winkle from 1970 woke up today after his long nap, he might ask,
Whatever happened to holography? Holographic imaging never came to movies or television, and
the holographic telepresence of convention speakers is based on the old Peppers Ghost illusion
rather than real holograms. Yet holographic displays have found some specialized niches. Furthermore,
holograms are used in industry in many ways that go unrecognized, such as holographic optics, and
security imprints on packaging and some currencies. We may never watch wide-screen movies in
glorious holovision, but who would have expected us to be carrying holograms in our pockets on credit
cards?
Note: This chapter is adapted from [10].
122
References
1. D. Gabor, A new microscopic principle, Nature 161, 777778 (1948).
2. P. Kirkpatrick and H. M. A. El-Sum, Image formation by reconstructed wavefronts I. Physical
principles and methods of renement, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 46, 825831 (1956).
3. E. N. Leith and J. Upatnieks, Reconstructed wavefronts and communication theory, J. Opt. Soc. Am.
52, 11231130 (1962).
4. E. N. Leith and J. Upatnieks, Wavefront reconstruction with continuous tone objects, J. Opt. Soc. Am.
53, 13771381 (1963).
5. E. N. Leith and J. Upatnieks, Wavefront reconstruction with diffused illumination and threedimensional objects, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 54, 12951301 (1964).
6. Anonymous, 3-D lasography: the month-old giant, Laser Focus 1(1), 1015 (1965).
7. E. N. Leith and J. Upatnieks, Photography by laser, Sci. Am. 212(6), 3435 (1965).
8. S. Johnston, Holographic Visions: A History of a New Science (Oxford, 2006).
9. S. A. Gamble, The hologram and its antecedents 18911965: the illusory history of a three-dimensional
illusion, Ph.D. dissertation (Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, 2004).
10. J. Hecht, Holography and the laser, Opt. Photon. News 21(78), 3441 (2010).
123
19601974

David A. Belforte
n the 100 years of OSA, laser technology has played a part for more than 50 years and
industrial laser materials processing has played a part for more than 40 years. This capsule
view presents the highlights of these years.
Prior to 1970, a handful of commercial laser suppliers, located mostly in the United
States, attempted to satisfy requests from a number of industrial manufacturers that showed
an interest in the possibility of a laser materials processing solution to a unique production
problem. A 1966 publication stated, This year will mark the beginning of an accelerated
growth for lasers. Many of the early problems involved in their use are nearing solution. In
the commercial markets, the applications will center on welding and other high-power CO2
and neodymium YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet) lasers : : : [1]. Interestingly, this otherwise
optimistic report ended with the statement, The markets for lasers will gradually develop
over the next few years, but they are not nearly as imminent or as large as is frequently
quoted.
One reason behind this disparity may be found in the premise that the laser was born fully
grown, a view held by many who read about the amazing possibilities for this powerful energy
source, as evidenced by the commonly quoted line that lasers are a solution looking for a
problem [2]. Industrial manufacturers that approached these scientic laser companies were
from many different industries: glass, with interest in cutting at plate glass [3]; mining, with
interest in rock drilling [4]; packaging, with interest in cutting steel rule dies [5]; aircraft engines,
with interest in processing turbine engine components [6]; sheet metal cutting [7]; paper, for
cutting and slitting paper [8]; and microelectronics, with accelerating interest in trimming
resistors and printed circuits [9] and cutting/scribing ceramic substrates [10]. Of these, only
the latter two advanced to widespread industrial utilization stages in the late 1960s, pushed by
soaring growth in the microelectronics industry. The others, all technically good applications,
languished for a few years, fullling the prophecy cited above, as the laser suppliers struggled to
develop devices with more power or better beam quality with improved reliability and maintenance procedures.
The most economically successful applications drawing attention from a wide segment of the
worlds media were the use of a CO2 laser beam to cut woven fabric for made-to-order mens
suits [11] and the use of a pulsed ruby laser beam to drill holes in diamond dies used as wire
drawing dies [12]. The latter was the rst industrial laser processing machine to be exhibited in
the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
While technical and economic cases can be built to explain the slow commercial success of
the laser as a manufacturing process tool, widespread implementation of laser processes was
inhibited to a degree by published articles. These articles were headlined, for example, Death
rays benet mankind, a phrase that can be attributed to a number of journalists searching for
attention-grabbing headlines in the early 1970s. Implementation was also stalled because of the
unfortunate labeling, by engineering societies and the U.S. government, of laser processing
systems as a nonconventional materials processing technology.
One anecdote that illustrates the former is this authors personal experience. While
negotiating the purchase of a high-power CO2 laser welding machine by a Fortune 500 company,
he was startled to hear a company ofcial sanction the purchase because he was impressed by
successful laser cataract surgery performed on his brother-in-law.
124
Thus, the industrial laser suppliers of the early 1970s were faced with an additional selling
burden, easing the concerns of uninformed, risk-wary buyers, and reassuring potential buyers that
their lasers were reliable and safe. A common selling tactic was to identify a laser champion as the
potential customer and to educate this person to be an inside sales advocate. Many of these
champions became laser industry advocates through their willingness to publish complimentary
articles.
Overcoming the nonconventional tag took many years [13], and it was not until the late 1980s that
this sobriquet was dropped by those charged with producing industry statistics. The 1970s, a period
that saw the blooming of several industrial laser suppliers, is considered by most analysts to be the
beginning of the industrial laser market, with annual revenues for laser sales ramping from $2 million to
$20 million in the rst decade of the market, an almost 26% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Several applications drove this growth: thin gauge sheet metal cutting [14], microelectronic package
sealing [15], cooling hole drilling in aircraft turbine engine blades and vanes [16], steel-rule die board
cutting [17], and semiconductor wafer dicing [18]all applications that continue successfully today.
An interesting footnote to the early beginnings of the industrial laser material processing era is that
these applications, and many that rose to prominence later, were accomplished using lasers that can best
be called industrialized scientic lasers, which were controlled by analog programmable controllers
or tape reader numerical control (NC) devices. MIT scientists developed numerical control for
machining in the 1970s, and it became commonly used in the 1980s. This technology was a major
contributor to the growth of lasers for industrial material processing applications. The evolution to
computer numerical control (CNC) [19] and the industrial development of minicomputers in the 1980s
and the microprocessor in the 1990s vaulted the industrial use of lasers to annual growth rates in the
mid-teens.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, solid-state lasers led by Nd:YAG devices and ultra-reliable lowpower, sealed-off CO2 units remained the backbone of the industrial laser materials processing
industry. On a smaller scale, excimer lasers were used mostly in semiconductor processing [20] and
metal [21] and non-metal applications in the manufacture of medical devices. These lasers had evolved
from the scientic designs of the 1970s into ruggedized, reliable, low-maintenance products that were
being integrated by system manufacturers into material processing products acceptable to a broad
range of global consumer product manufacturing companies.
The utilization of industrial lasers, very much advanced in the U.S. in the rst two decades of the
technology, was due in great part to the marketing prowess of domestic equipment suppliers. This is
counter to some international views, mainly in Europe, that the U.S. government, through the
Department of Defense (DOD), funded the development of the laser products that were being used
in commercial industrial applications. In reality, the industrial laser and systems suppliers of the 1970s
and 1980s were essentially a part of a bootstrap industry, self-funded in terms of equipment and
applications development. What little funding owed from the U.S. government through its DOD
Manufacturing Technology programs was focused on laser applications that could improve or repair
defense products. In part, this lack of a national initiative to support progress in manufacturing
stultied the growth of the industrial laser economy.
Stepping into the void left by this modest industrial laser program, the government of Japan in the
1980s and Germany (supported in part by the European Union) undertook university-based efforts to
understand and improve the laser beam/material interaction on a broad range of materials. In Japan,
most of the effort focused on dening and improving the process of laser cutting sheet metals [22],
specically stainless steel, at that time a major industry in that country. As a result, increased output
power from new types of CO2 lasers, improved gas-assist nozzle signs, and purpose-built cutting
systems entered the market from a number of suppliers, rst in Japan to a large number of custom
cutting job shops and then exported to the international markets. In addition to this effort, the
Japanese government funded a major program for exible manufacturing, which had as a part the
development of a very-high-power CO2 laser that vaulted the selected supplier to the top of the CO2
power chain.
In the late 1980s, almost concurrent with the laser cutting development in Japan, European CO2
laser suppliers [23] made efforts to expand their markets by improving their product lines. This
125
spawned the development of RF excited high-power CO2 lasers and the consequent alliances with
system integrators while educating the market about laser technology. In several countries, a make
it with lasers program found eager interest among manufacturers. In Germany, the federal and
state governments funded programs to improve the process of laser cutting, and one effort was
designed to improve the manufacturing capability of small- to medium-sized manufacturers so they
could become global competitors. As a consequence, the technology of laser material processing
became familiar to manufacturers [24], paving the way for future employment of these processes in
their manufacturing operations. European industry became laser aware, a situation that
prompted the government to heavily sponsor laser and applications development, which has led
Europe to become the major center of industrial laser and material processing and development
today.
The late 1980s and the 1990s have been judged as the golden years of industrial laser materials
processing. Abundant, pertinent, and benecial development of laser applications, and the lasers and
systems to achieve the processes, occurred during this period, led by institutions such as the various
Fraunhofers [25] that built upon the basic understandings necessary to expand the use of these
processes throughout the manufacturing world. As a consequence, industrial laser sales grew by more
than a factor of eight in the period from 1985 to 1999. Driving market growth were global industries
such as automotive, aerospace, agriculture, and shipbuilding for high-power lasers, and semiconductor,
microelectronics, and medical devices for low-power units. The lasers being used remained those that
had been introduced in the 1970s: Nd:YAG lamp and diode pumped at both the fundamental and the
frequency-shifted wavelengths, CO2 with output power up to 8 kW, and excimer that had a major
redesign into more reliable products.
The turn of the century marked the thirtieth year for industrial laser materials processing, and the
total industrial laser system market was then approaching $3 billion and laser sales were almost $1
billion, both experiencing a 23% CAGR [26]. The technology of laser applications was centered in
Europe as was much of high-power laser development, while the U.S. retained leadership in the solidstate laser and microprocessing sectors and Japan, as a consequence of national economic conditions,
slipped from a leadership role in the industrial laser market.
At this point, laser materials processing had become accepted by mainstream global manufacturing
industries and the technology no longer was classied as unconventional machining, perhaps due in
part to the fact that in 2000, laser machines represented about 10% of the total machine tools sold
globally.
In the rst decade of the new century, industrial laser growth showed a dramatic increase until the
great recession of 2008/2009. After this major setback, the industry rebounded to prerecession levels,
rapidly led by surging sales of high-power ber lasers that were replacing high-power CO2 lasers in
sheet metal cutting applications. The rise of ber lasers in this decade as replacements for other lasers
used in established applications was the rst major shift in the types of industrial lasers selected to
satisfy industrial market demands. Low-power ber lasers replaced solid-state lasers for marking and
engraving applications, substituting for diode-pumped rod type devices in this market that installs more
than 20,000 units per year. In 2012, ber lasers represented 27% of the laser materials processing
systems installed [26].
Also appearing in this period were high-power direct diode lasers with improved beam quality that
increased the market for this efcient compact laser. Although output power for these focused beam
devices had yet to reach the multikilowatt level, these lasers created interest among the many cutting
system suppliers that had already converted to high-power ber lasers.
As this is being written, the market for industrial lasers for material processing is well on the way to
breaking the $10 billion/year mark. In 2012, 50% of the world market for industrial lasers was in Asia.
Major markets have been established in China and Southeast Asia, and looming on the horizon are
markets in South America, Russia, and India, which are expected to add to growth opportunities for
industrial lasers.
Further, a new generation of laser and system suppliers is appearing in Asia with companies rst
serving domestic needs but eventually entering the global markets, establishing competition for the old
line sellers that have dominated the market for decades.
126
References
1. Anonymous, Lasers: solutions nally nding problems, Samson Trends, April 1966.
2. J. Hecht, Beam: Race to Make the Laser (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 9.
3. Anonymous, Laser materials processing enters new domain: controlled fracturing, Laser Focus 4(9),
12 (1968).
4. G. B. Clark, Rock disintegration, the key to mining progress, Eng. Mining J. (E&MJ) 23, 4751
(1971).
5. A. G. Troka, NC lasernew boost for steel rule die making, in Machine and Tool Blue Book, Vol. 67,
No. 1 (1972), pp. 5255.
6. J. J. Marklew, Rolls Royce evaluating high-power laser equipment, Mach. Prod. Eng. 117(3018),
486488 (1970).
7. I. Slater and J. M. Webster, Gas-jet laser beam machining, in Proceedings of the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Conference (ASME, 1970), paper 70-GT-47.
8. C. H. Miller and T. A. Osial, Laser as a paper cutter, presented at the Fifteenth Annual IEEE Pulp and
Paper Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 710 May 1969.
9. M. E. Cohen and J. P. Epperson, Application of lasers to microelectronic fabrication, Adv. Electron 4,
139186 (1968).
10. J. Longfellow and D. J. Oberholzer, The application of the CO2 caser to cutting ceramic substrates,
in IEEE 1969 International Conference Digest (IEEE, 1969), paper 3C.3, pp. 146147.
11. Anonymous, Genesco expands laser cutting of fabric at suit plants in Baltimore and Virginia, Laser
Focus 7(10), 9 (1971).
12. J. G. Prout, Jr. and W. E. Priti, Laser drilling of diamond wire drawing dies, Laser Industrial
Application Notes, Nos. 170 (Raytheon Company Laser Advanced Development Center, 1970).
13. Anonymous, A laser metal saw, Optical Spectra, February 1970, p. 33.
14. M. J. Adams, Gas jet laser cutting, presented at the Welding Institute Conference, Advances in
Wielding Processes, Harrogate, England, 14 April 1970.
15. E. T. Maloney and S. R. Bolin, Limited penetration welding, SME Technical Paper MRT74956
(Society of Manufacturing Engineers, 1974).
16. Anonymous, Laser cuts costs of putting air holes in in jet blades, American Metal Market/
Metalworking News, 3 April 1972, p. 21.
17. Anonymous, Laser beam cutting automates die making, Boxboard Containers 78(1), 5055 (1970).
18. Anonymous, Laser scribing of wafers offers two ways to save Microwaves, August 1970, p. 71.
19. Y. Koren, Control of machine tools, J. Manu. Sci. Eng. 119, 749755 (1997).
20. R. F. Wood, Excimer laser processing of semiconductor devices: high-efciency solar cells, Proc. SPIE
0710, 63 (1987).
21. A. J. Pedraza, Excimer laser processing of metals, J. Metals 29(2), 1417 (1987).
22. N. Karube and A. Egawa, Laser cutting and welding using an RF excited fast axial CO2 laser,
in Proceedings of ISATA Laser 21 Conference (ISATA, 1989), Vol. 1, p. 411.
23. S. Jurg, Process optimization in laser material processing, Proc. SPIE 0236, 467 (1981).
24. H. E. Puell, High-power lasers for applications in European automotive manufacturing, in Industrial
Laser Annual Handbook, 1988 ed., D. Belforte and M. Levitt, eds. (PennWell, 1988), pp. 9599.
25. D. A. Belforte, A year well gladly forget, in Industrial Laser Solutions, Vol. 17, No. 1 (PennWell,
2002), pp. 1421.
26. D. A. Belforte, 2012 annual economic review and forecast, in Industrial Laser Solutions, Vol. 28,
No. 1 (PennWell, 2013), pp. 616.
127
19601974

Jay Eastman
Introduction
It is not an overstatement to say that barcodes are nearly everywhere you lookvirtually every
product you purchase at a supermarket, hardware store, liquor store, book store, or elsewhere
carries a universal product code (UPC) barcode printed on the package or an attached label.
Most package delivery services, including Federal Express, UPS, and the United States Postal
Service, use barcodes on packages for tracking purposes. As a consequence we can track whether
the book we ordered from Amazon has shipped, and at any time we please, know where our
book is on the route from Amazon to our front door.
Barcode scanners are equally ubiquitous. Scanners are at most check-out counters where we
shop. Some of us even carry a barcode scanner with us wherever we goin the form of an app on
our smartphone. One smartphone app can build a grocery shopping list by simply scanning
barcodes on empty packages before they go into the recycling bin.
This article provides an illustrated overview of the history of barcode scanning, beginning
with the development of the various barcode symbologies, and following through the development of the scanning devices used to read the barcodes. Since the barcode industry has been very
competitive, little information was published in technical journals. Inventions were either
patented or treated as trade secrets. This article will illustrate the history of barcode scanning
based on key patents issued in the eld. Figure 1 illustrates by year the number of patents issued
that include either of the terms barcode or bar code. Issued barcode patents rose from a
trickle in the early 1980s to a high of 265 patents in 2003.
Barcode Symbologies
The rst mention of encoding information into printed dark bars and white spaces was disclosed
in U.S. patent 1,985,035 submitted by Kermode, Young, and Sparks in 1930. The patent was
ultimately issued on 18 December 1934 and assigned to Westinghouse. The invention described a
card sorting system for organizing electric bill payments by geographic region, thus simplifying
the work of accurately tabulating customer payments.
The rst true barcode was a circular bullseye symbol invented by Silver and Woodland
(see Fig. 2). The two disclosed their invention to the U.S. Patent Ofce in 1949 and their patent,
numbered 2,612,994, was issued on 7 October 1952. The patent contained claims covering a
circular bullseye symbol on an item and an apparatus to read the symbol.
In the late 1960s a group of supermarket chains began to realize efciencies could be gained
with a more automated checkout process. Several checkout methodologies were formulated and
subsequently studied resulting in a recommendation to adopt an 11-digit product identication
code. This effort ultimately resulted in the formation of the UPC Symbology Committee in March
1971. The committee was charged with selecting a symbology concept and providing a detailed
specication for the selected symbology. The Symbology Committee also worked with suppliers
of optical readers for the selected symbology.
The symbol ultimately adopted was the UPC symbol found on most products today, as
shown in Fig. 3. In the U.S. the leading digits of a symbol, which identify a manufacturer, are
128
licensed by GS1 US, a private rm responsible for maintaining the assignment of

manufacturers identication numbers.
The following ve digits are assigned by
a manufacturer for each product it produces. The nal check sum digit is used to
ensure the data integrity of the scanning
and decoding processes.
Numerous other symbologies have
been developed over the years for other
applications ranging from inventory con Fig. 1. Number of patents issued (including either of the
terms barcode or bar code).
trol through military logistics to package
tracking by delivery companies. Some of
these, such as Code 3 of 9 (aka Code 39)
and Interleaved 2 of 5, are purely numeric
codes. Others, such as Code 93 and Code 128,
are full alphanumeric codes. Examples of these
one-dimensional (1D) symbologies are illustrated
in Fig. 4.
The need for labels containing ever-increasing
amounts of data led to the development of stacked
codes and two-dimensional (2D) codes. A complete
discussion of these higher information density
symbologies is beyond the scope of this article.
Examples of higher information density 2D symbologies are shown in Fig. 5.
Supermarket Barcode
Scanners
Fig. 2.
symbol.
First true barcode using a circular bullseye
In 1971, RCA began the rst system test of a

bullseye scanner at a Kroger supermarket in Cincinnati, Ohio. This test and others continued
through early 1974. The rst full-scale implementation of supermarket checkout scanning began at
Marsh Supermarkets in Troy, Ohio, when a pack
of Wrigleys chewing gum was scanned by a laser
checkout scanner on 26 June 1974. The scanner,
jointly developed by NCR and Spectra Physics,
Inc., is described in U.S. patent 4,064,390 (the
390 patent) issued on 20 December 1977 and
assigned to Spectra Physics. One of the original
0
5
scanners, Spectra Physics serial number 006, from
Check
Cnty.
the rst Marsh Supermarket installation is now on
Manufacturer #
Product #
Digit
Code
display at the Smithsonian Institute in Washing Fig. 3. UPC symbol.
ton, D.C.
These initial supermarket scanners were enormous in comparison to the laser scanners common in todays checkout counters. The scanner was very
large and sat directly on the oor. Its scanning window was at the end of a grocery conveyor that sat on
top of the checkout counter. The scanners dimensions were 30 inches high 12 inches wide 18 inches
12345 67999
129
Fig. 4.
Examples of 1D symbologies.
Fig. 5.
Examples of higher information density 2D symbologies.
deep. The scanner is aptly described as being about equally comprised of optics, mechanics, and
electronics.
Before beginning a discussion of the optical path through this scanner, is it useful to consider
factors involved in scanning a UPC barcode symbol. The UPC symbol was designed so that it could be
scanned by a simple X conguration scanning pattern. As a result, the UPC symbol is split into two
halves that can be scanned in two separate scanning passes. In order to ensure that the two halves are
assembled in the correct order, a check digit and design features such as differing start and stop bar
patterns for the left- and right-hand halves of the symbol are included in the UPC symbology
specication. Figure 6 illustrates that the beam labeled A scans through the entire left half of the
label, while the beam scanning down and to the right (B) scans through the complete right half of the
label. In principle, these two scans produce a scanning signal which allows the entire label to be decoded
by the scanning system.
Figure 7 from the 390 patent illustrates a portion of the optical path in the Spectra-Physics
scanner. A 24-facet optical polygon, denoted by R, provides a mechanism that produces orthogonal
horizontal and vertical scan lines on a product (the cube at the top of the illustration). A laser beam
entering at the bottom right of the gure is directed by mirror 60 through a slot in the polygon mirror
assembly to mirror 82. This mirror subsequently sends the beam to mirror 84, through beamsplitter 86
and lens 88 to mirror 42 and on to lens 90. Lenses 88 and 90 form a relay telescope used in generating
vertical scan lines. After lens 90, the beam is deected by the polygon mirror and reected by fold mirror
94 through the scanner window 34 to impinge on the product. Light scattered from the barcode label on
the product follows a retro-directive path back through the optical system and ultimately impinges on a
photodetector (not shown).
Vertical scan lines are generated in a similar manner and follow a similar beam path as the
horizontal scan lines, however, each beam from beamsplitter assembly 54, 56, 58 makes two reections
from two separate polygon mirrors. An ingenious arrangement of facet tilt angles of sequential polygon
mirrors results in three vertical scan lines for each horizontal scan line. The slots in the face of the
polygon assembly are designed so that only one horizontal or vertical scan line passes through the
scanning window at any given time.
A large fractional horsepower AC motor rotated the 390 scanner polygon at 3400 RPM
producing scanning speeds of 8000 in./min. The retro-directive light collection path utilized aspheric
collection optics to minimize spherical aberration and coma. Narrow-band optical lters rejected
ambient light. These design features resulted in breathtaking, state-of-the-art, scanning performance. It
was possible to literally throw a ve-stick pack of chewing gum spinning across the scanning window
and have its barcode label decode on the rst pass! Now, nearly 40 years later, present day supermarket
130
checkout scanners are hard pressed to achieve

this degree of scanning performance, but they are
cheaper, much smaller, and draw substantially less
electrical power, all of which add to the bottom line
of the supermarket.
Handheld Barcode
Scanners
12345 67999
Scanners used in supermarket applications quickly

0
5
moved to laser scanning due to the high scanning
Fig. 6. Simple X conguration scanning pattern.
speed and large depth of focus available from such
devices. Initial industrial applications of barcodes,
such as inventory control and tracking work in
process, had signicantly lower performance
requirements and required lower price points. Initially simple barcode wands were used for these
purposes. An early barcode wand is described by
Turner and Elia in U.S. patent 3,916,184 assigned
to Welch Allyn, Inc. (the 184 wand). The 184
wand utilized an incandescent bulb or LED and a
ber optic bundle to illuminate the barcode symbol
through an opening in the case. A simple two-lens
system and photocell or photodiode produced an
electrical signal representative of the barcode symbol as the wand was manually scanned across the
label. Apertures in the two-lens system controlled
the depth of eld and eld of view (i.e., resolution of
the barcode label) of the wand.
Since wands were in contact with the label
during scanning, the label became degraded when
scanned multiple times. Another common problem
with wands was that paper lint would accumulate in the entrance opening and degrade scanning
performance. To improve on early wands, Bayley of
Hewlett Packard suggested the use of a sapphire ball
lens in the opening of the wand in U.S. patent
Fig. 7. A portion of the optical path in the Spectra4,855,582. Hewlett Packards commercial product
Physics
scanner.
based on this patent had a compact hermetic electronic package that housed the illumination LED
and a photosensor. The highly integrated design was cost effective and very rugged, an important
requirement for any handheld device in an industrial or warehouse environment.
The contact nature of barcode wands was a disadvantage in many industrial environments since
the label was often read several times during a manufacturing or inventory process, or in package
tracking. These applications drove the development of non-contact handheld scanners. An early
example is described in U.S. patent 4,560,862, rst disclosed to the Patent Ofce in 1983. The concept
of this patent is illustrated Fig. 8. A rotating polygon with concave mirrors scans an image of an
incandescent source across a barcode symbol. The illuminated scanning plane is then imaged back
along the optical path to a beamsplitter which directs the returning light through a relay lens, aperture
stop and eld stop to a photodetector. The curved mirrors on the polygon have various radii, thus
producing multiple temporally multiplexed focal planes on the photodetector due to rotation of the
131
Fig. 8. Concept of U.S.

patent 4,560,862: A rotating
polygon with concave mirrors
scans an image of an
incandescent source across a
barcode symbol.
Fig. 9. Examples of visible

laser diode barcode scanners,
in approximate chronological
order from left to right. (Courtesy
of Cybarcode, Inc.)
polygon. The commercial device utilized eight spherical mirrors on the polygon and was housed in a
gun shaped housing for convenient handling, and used a trigger for selection of a barcode label to be
read.
Eastman and Boles disclosed the rst laser diode based xed-beam handheld laser scanner to the
patent ofce in 1983, resulting in issuance of U.S. patent 4,603,262 in July 1986. The xed-beam
scanner, similar in size to a childs squirt gun and the rst to use surface mount electronics to reduce size
and weight, was scanned by the users wrist motion. The laser diode operated at 780 nm, so its light was
not readily visible to a user. Consequently a visible marker beam propagated coaxially with the laser
beam to enable the user to point the scanner at a barcode label. The scanner had no moving parts other
than its trigger button, so it was very rugged and capable of operating after a drop from a second-story
window onto a concrete sidewalk with no ill effects.
Both of the above devices were quickly eclipsed by HeNe-based moving beam handheld laser
scanners. U.S. patent 4,409,470 by Shepard, Barkan, and Swartz disclosed a narrow-bodied laser bar
code scanner that became successful in the early to mid-1980s as Symbol Technologies LS-7000. The
advent of low-cost visible laser diodes quickly led to the availability of rugged handheld laser scanners
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as described in U.S. patents 4,760,248; 4,820,911; and 5,200, 579. In
order to avoid the strong patent position of Symbol Technologies in handheld laser barcode scanners,
Rockstein, Knowles, and their colleagues invented a triggerless handheld barcode scanner as
described in U.S. patent 5,260,553. This device automatically began scanning when a barcode symbol
was in close proximity. Several examples of visible laser diode barcode scanners are shown in Fig. 9, in
approximate chronological order from left to right.
132
Imaging Barcode Scanners

As higher-density stacked and matrix (i.e., 2D) codes became prevalent, the need for handheld
scanners capable of quickly and reliably reading these symbologies became important. Although laser
scanner manufacturers attempted to adapt laser scanners to reading 2D codes using two dimensional
raster scanning (see, for example, U.S. patent 5,235,167) these devices never achieved the level of
performance laser line scanners could achieve reading 1D barcodes. Thus, in the mid-1990s patents
began to appear for scanners that imaged the barcode symbol onto a CCD or CMOS array for
detection. Broad-area illumination of the symbol was provided using LEDs. Three early examples of
handheld 2D imaging bar code scanning technology were disclosed by Wang and Ju in U.S. patents
5,521,366 and 5,572,006, and by Krichever and Metlitsky in U.S. patent 5,396,054.
Details from patent 5,572,006 illustrate the basic conguration of an early handheld 2D imaging
barcode scanner. The barcode is illuminated by an illumination array that typically comprised a circuit
board, on which LEDs are mounted to broadly illuminate the target area in which the barcode symbol is
located. A lens images the illuminated barcode symbol onto a sensor array, which may be either a CCD
or CMOS imaging array.
Numerous patents disclosed various techniques for decoding 2D barcode symbologies, but
discussion of these techniques is beyond the scope of this short historical article. Readers interested
in this aspect of the technology are encouraged to read an excellent text specically on barcode
symbologies: The Bar Code Book by Roger C. Palmer. Imaging scanners have several advantages over
laser scanners in that they are capable of capturing images of objects and people. Of course, this
functionality is dependent on the rmware built into the device. Image quality from a scanner may not
rival that of todays low-cost digital point and shoot cameras.
Many of us today routinely carry devices that can serve as 1D and 2D scannersour smartphones.
For example, there are currently at least 100 barcode scanning apps for an iPhone, most of which are
available as free downloads. A search of either the Google Play or the Microsoft Marketplace app store
lists numerous barcode scanning programs, many of which are also free. Some barcode scanning apps
can decode a barcode, search the Internet to nd product pricing, list nearby stores that carry the
product, and display a map with directions to the store of your choice.
Use of these scanning apps is as simple as pointing your smartphones camera at the barcode
symbol. Thats itno focusing, no careful alignment, and no tapping the screen to capture a picture.
The app auto-focuses, auto-recognizes that a barcode is present, decodes the symbol, and nally
searches the Internet for available information. Nothing could be simpler; this is truly shopping made
easyand very impulsive!
133
19601974

Gary Starkweather
nventors usually realize that any good idea owes some debt to earlier technological developments. The laser printer is no exception. In 1938, Chester Carlson, a struggling patent attorney,
needed a way to copy patents other than by hand. That led him to develop a technology now
known as xerography from which the company Xerox was born. The word xerography comes
from the Greek words xeros and graphein which mean respectively dry and writing. The
laser printer, as we now know it, depends on this wonderful imaging capability.
Xerox introduced the rst real copier in 1959 and called it the 914, with the number
standing for the largest paper the machine could copy. Despite warnings by market experts to
the contrary, the 914 became one of the most protable products ever produced in the Western
world. Xerox started developing many different kinds of imaging machines. One of the most
interesting and advanced for its time was a limited-volume product called LDX for Long Distance
Xerography.
As a young engineer coming to Xerox in 1964, one of the challenges the author was given
was to see if the LDX system could be made faster. The LDX system as built in the middle 1960s
was a design with limited extensibility. A line scan cathode ray tube (CRT) was used with an
imaging lens to scan an original document. The light was picked up by a light sensor and sent
over a 56-kilobaud (kBd) line to a receiver at a location perhaps hundreds of miles away. This
sort of bandwidth was not readily available but could be purchased if needed. The receiving
station also had a line scan CRT whose beam was modulated to generate a variable-intensity
light signal that a lens imaged to expose a xerographic drum similar to that used in a copier. The
problem was that the CRT used for exposure was pushed hard to get enough light output. It took
many seconds to print a document, and there was a real desire to go much faster. The immediate
challenge was to nd a better way.
Being a graduate student at the University of Rochester Institute of Optics, the author was
using a new light source: the heliumneon (HeNe) laser, invented in 1961. Its main advantage
was its brightness or radiance. Because the laser beam was highly conned rather than a
Lambertian radiator, its radiance was thousands of times higher than the CRT. The red beam
was a concern for current photoreceptors in the copiers, but as a bright, deectable light source, it
had no peer. The author set about to see what might be done with the laser as an illuminator for
the print and perhaps even the scan station.
A key advantage of the CRT was the fact that magnetic or electrostatic elds could deect
the electron beam on the screen. Laser beams, as someone has described them, are stiff and so
they need something to deect them. The only practical solution was putting several mirror facets
on a rotating disk. Using 10 to 20 or more facets greatly reduced the required rotational speed.
However, the mirror facets and rotational axis had to be kept within a very few arc seconds of
each other while rotating at several thousand revolutions per minute. This is an exceedingly
difcult requirement for a cost-effective commercial product. The author built a laser facsimile
prototype with a modied 914 (720 series) copier to scan an original and print the results. His
skilled colleague Robert Kowalski built electronics generating about 1000 V to drive a special
Pockels-cell beam modulator. Switching 1000 V in a small fraction of a microsecond even with a
small capacitance was not trivial.
The two researchers clamped, taped, and otherwise assembled a scan and print breadboard
to the 720 copier with a special red-sensitive drum and made some laser fax copies in 19681969.
134
The lack of precision in the scanning mirror left bands in the images, but the demonstration showed
what a laser system could do. However, a way had to be found to make a precise scanner without
spending $20,000 each.
After thinking about the precision requirements for several days, the author came upon an idea
while sketching the problem on a piece of paper. It looked as though a cylinder lens would solve the
problem. If it would, it was puzzling why no one else had discovered it. A 12-in. (30.48-cm)-long
cylinder lens was ordered, which arrived the next day by air. What was the result? Eureka! It solved
the scanner problem. A scanner with perhaps 1 or 2 arc min of error could perform a task that
would have required 1 arc sec precision. The scanner was now going to be very inexpensive.
Today, such a simple six-sided polygon and motor system for a personal laser printer costs less than
$5$10.
About this time, the author began to wonder about an idea after talking with a couple of other
people. Why not forget the input scanner and use a computer to generate the signal patterns for a print
station only?
Up to this time, every part the author and Robert Kowalski had used was already part of their
laboratory equipment since no spending on this effort was permitted. Furthermore, about this time a
more serious, non-technical issue arose.
The authors immediate manager got wind of his idea and stated in no uncertain terms that this was
a bad idea and that he wanted all work on it stopped. This was the beginning of a real challenge: To
continue the project or let it go? The author decided to continue working on it less obviously. The
situation was heading to a real confrontation when, one day in early 1970, the author read in the
company newsletter about a new research center being started in Palo Alto, California. He called one
person he knew in the starting group to ask how to tell them about the project and described what was
being worked on. They decided to y the author out to California to make a case for the new printer
technology.
The trip was a rousing success. A group also becoming part of the new Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC) was working on a personal computer that bit-mapped text and graphics onto a display much
like todays Macs and PCs. They needed a way to render their pixel-oriented screen image to paper. The
new laser printer was a natural t to their needs. They were willing to take the author into their
organization, but there was one problem: management in Rochester would have to approve a
transfer. The author promised to nd a way to get this done.
Upon the authors return to Rochester, his manager refused to permit the transfer to PARC.
Technically, this was a violation of company policy. After some stressful discussions the author took the
issue to a more senior level. Eventually, after some tense but productive discussions, George White, an
energetic and future-oriented Xerox vice president, approved the transfer to PARC, and the author
moved his young family to California in early January of 1971. Thus began work in earnest on the laser
printer.
Spearheaded by the visionary genius of Jack Goldman, PARC was a great place to build this
machine as well as being a font of other great technologies. The invaluable Bob Kowalski from the
Webster, New York, Xerox facilities was hired. John Urbach, now deceased, provided a lot of
encouragement as well as nancial support. He reported to one of the best managers and mentors
anyone could have, Bill Gunning, who helped the author set realistic and important goals for the rst
printer and provided very wise counsel.
The group decided to build a prototype that would print at one page per second and at a spatial
density of 500 laser points per inch in both the fast and slow scan directions. A solution to the poor red
sensitivity of standard Xerox photoreceptors emerged from a major optical system design error in the
Xerox 7000 duplicator that did not show up until early production. The only practical way to remedy
this optical system problem was to replace the usual bluegreen-sensitive photoreceptor with one more
sensitive in the red part of the spectrum on the drum of the 7000. This error was a truly fortuitous event
allowing the laser printer work to proceed. It is unlikely that the printer would have had the necessary
backing if it alone had required a special photoreceptor.
The Xerox 7000 with the red-sensitive drum was going to be used to print one page per second
using a HeNe laser. This meant generating at least 20 million points per second from the scanner. The
135
scanner was more than capable of doing

this, and the author designed an optical
system that would scan a 6075 m spot
across an 11-in. page in under 200 s. Bob
Kowalski and others began building a testpattern generator that would produce grid
patterns and some character forms that
would drive the laser modulator at the
required data rate. The actual operational
data rate was closer to 30 Mb/s due to scan
inefciencies and other factors in the
prototype.
In November 1971, after putting to Fig. 1. First PARC prototype laser printer.
gether the prototype shown in Fig. 1, the
group was able to print grid patterns and
some simple text lines at one page/s.
The results were exciting. There were
some competing efforts using other technologies for computer printing, but the
laser printer won out as it used what
George White liked to call zero dimensional imaging. When you print with
points, you can print any arbitrary pattern
at quality levels the technology will permit.
No more xed letter formats as in a typewriter or line printer. Alan Kay and others
built an experimental character generator
to drive the prototype printer through a
cable running from the character generator
in the computer science lab to the laser
Fig. 2. Dover printer with covers open.
printer lab because the character generator
also had other uses.
PARCs expansion as the prototype was developed further created another problem. The computer
science lab was moved to a newly acquired building half a mile away, and with a freeway in between, no
cable could be run directly between the character generator (CG) and laser printer. How could the
system be tested in the next one to two years before the group was all back together again in the new
PARC facility on Coyote Hill Road? Fortunately, there was a clear line of sight between the two
buildings. Four 8-in. astronomical telescopes were bought, and two were placed in weatherized boxes
on the roof of one building and two on the other. That way, a modulated HeNe laser at each end sent
signals between the laser printer and the CG. For over a year the printer sent the start of the scan signals
to the CG and the CG sent us data back in synchronism with the critical start of the scan signal from the
printer. A 6-s delay in the light travel time yielded a 1-in. (2.54 cm.) extra margin on the printed sheet,
but that was quite tolerable for the development work. The group was back in business for the year they
were apart. In California, rain actually cleared the air, and measurements of the path transmission
efciency showed improvements when it rained!
Once the group was back together in 1973, a new laser printer was built for general employee use
at PARC, called EARS, for Electronic Array Raster Scanner. Ron Rider designed a hardware character
generator remarkable for its speed and capability. Everyone with an Alto computer at PARC could have
their documents printed on this machine at 1 page/s. Over the 15 to 18 months or so that it was in
service, over four million pages were printed.
The next big step after EARS was to take advantage of the novel image generation capabilities of
the Alto II computer and develop a 60-page/min. laser printer named Dover built on the same 7000
copier base in 19761977. Figure 2 shows a Dover printer with the top covers open.
136
Figure 3 shows the Dover laser head

with the laser beam light path. This machine ran with a software image generator
combined with a novel hardware board
resident in the Alto computer itself. Data
were printed at a spatial pixel density of
384 pixels/in. This permitted a much lower
cost system, and 35 of these machines were
built for selected users in conjunction with
Electro Optical Systems in Pasadena.
The Dover printers had digital controls rather than the relay logic of the
7000, yielding a streamlined design and
a reproducible conguration at a modest
Fig. 3. Dover printer laser head.
price for a machine with such novel capabilities. One of these machines can be seen in the new Computer History Museum in Mountain View,
California.
In 1977, Xerox introduced the 9700 Electronic Printing System, which printed 2 pages/s at
300 pixels/inch. The paper supplies were big enough to permit over 40 minutes of printing without
paper reloading, and the paper trays could be relled while printing. Xerox management had hoped
that these printers would generate at least 250,000 prints per month on average. In actuality, they
averaged well over one million prints per month! Now that the technology has come down in cost, one
can readily buy low-cost personal monochrome or color laser printers. Fast, high-end color laser
printers now challenge traditional ink-on-paper printing technologies. In fact, digital copiers today are
really a return to the original laser fax idea. Some things just seem to require time and patience to
properly unfold.
It is hard to be thankful enough for the opportunity of working at Xerox and PARC in developing
this technology. These were exciting times in a beautiful location. What was once a nearly careerlimiting idea has become commonplace. A statement by Michelangelo is pertinent:
I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free.
137
19601974

Paul J. Wehrenberg
merican inventors including David Paul Gregg and James Russell originated some key
optical storage concepts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but initially envisioned
writing with electron beams and reading by directing laser beams through the material
to detectors on the other side. The concepts of a rotating disc and reective media made optical
storage a real possibility [1]. Rotating the disc and moving the optical pick-up (OPU) radially
gave the required two-dimensional access to the data surface. Reective media meant the emitters
and detectors could be on the same side of the disc, greatly easing optical alignment. Burying the
data surface in a transparent disc made the media robust in the hands of the consumer.
By the early 1970s, growing interest in read-only optical discs for Hollywood movie
distribution led to product development. A partnership between MCA and Philips, MCA
DiscoVision, introduced the rst consumer laser video disc (later called Laservision) in the
United States at the end of 1978. It used HeNe gas lasers to read molded or embossed pits on a
30-cm disc, the size of a vinyl LP record. Video information was encoded as a variable distance
between the edges of pits in a spiral track, yielding a frequency-modulated analog signal as the
disc rotated past the laser spot.
The details of the tracking process were quite complex, and it took longer than expected to
develop a reliable and low-cost process to mass produce the discs. Philips made the rst fully
playable disk in 1976, but it took an intense engineering effort to launch the rst qualied mass
production started at a factory in Blackburn, England, in 1981. The discs showed less wear than
VHS tape, and image quality was better, but those advantages were not enough for Laservision to
outcompete tape, which was less expensive and recordable (although most customers did not use
that aspect). In the end, VHS tape thoroughly dominated consumer video distribution until the
arrival of DVD in the mid-1990s.
In 1974 Philips Research Laboratories and the Philips Audio Division began developing an
optical audio-disc system. Their design thinking, further detailed below, is an excellent
example of system integration using the best of current technologies and additionally anticipating probable future developments in component technology, specically digital processing
power of consumer integrated circuits and wavelength reduction of solid state lasers. The
project grew internally in Philips, and it was decided that analog signal recording would not
work well enough and that a fully digital technique was a better approach. The magnitude of
the development effort made it attractive to have partners, and after some negotiation, an
agreement was reached with Sony in 1979. In-depth technical discussions were started,
focusing primarily on the error-correction signal processing. The contributions from both
companies resulted in a system standard which forms the physical basis of the compact disc
(CD) as we know it today.
Early in the project the disc size was chosen as 120 mm and called compact disk because it
was smaller than the 300-mm Laservision disc. They knew that the available and affordable solid
state lasers for the playback devices would give them about 1 mW at approximately 800 nm, and
designed the optical system accordingly (see Fig. 1) [2]. The laser beam passed through a 1.2-mm
transparent substrate to read data marks embossed onto the aluminized disk surface. The
embossing makes the data marks reective phase objects.
After dening the CD-A disc standard, Philips and Sony set up a licensing organization
which Philips still administers. Licensees receive a copy of the Red Book which details the
138
standard and optical performance metrics.

The physical standard focuses entirely on
the removable optical disc. The only constraint on the disc player is that it must be
able to read and play back standardformat discs. A great advantage of this
sort of standard is that it allowed openended growth in the capabilities of disc
players. For example, todays inexpensive
players transfer data at 16 times the
1.41 Mb per second of initial players. The
optics, servos, and electronics could handle twice that rate, but that would require
spinning the polycarbonate disk at 6400 to
16,000 revolutions per minute, reaching
speeds where the centrifugal force could
shatter the plastic disc, a very disconcerting experience for the user.
Several aspects of optical disc system
design are brilliant. One example is writing
data tracks as a very long spiral rather
than concentric circles, allowing massproduced players to read data by following
the track rather than creating it. Injection
molding can replicate discs accurately and
inexpensively, so this shifts the costs of
achieving the required precision to the
mastering machine, which is amortized
over millions of replicated discs. That also
allowed most players to play discs with
track pitch reduced to squeeze up to 99
minutes of music onto a disc originally
designed for 74 minutes. Inspired choices
of eight-to-fourteen modulation coding
and cross-interleaved ReedSolomon
error-correction code made the system resilient to random bit errors that if uncor Fig. 1. Artists rendering of playback optics in rst Philips CD
product, CD100. Size was 12 mm x 45 mm. Philips Technical
rected could blow out speakersvital
Review 40(6), 150 (1982).
because replicated disks had raw byte error
4
5
rates of 10 to 10 . Establishing 2352byte blocks for CD-audio discs left room
for the error-correction codes needed to meet computer requirements of bit-error rates less than 1012,
allowing development of CD-ROM for computer storage.
Writable and Re-Writable Discs

Research on write-once and rewritable optical discs accelerated in the 1970s in the U.S., Europe,
and Japan as read-only discs were being developed as products. A big challenge was the limited
laser power available. In France, Thomson-CSF and later Alcatel Thomson Gigadisc developed
glass-substrate discs coated with thin layers of a proprietary material probably similar to
nitrocellulose, plus metals including a nal malleable layer of gold. It was a clever way to write
139
data, as microscopic bumps in the gold layer, were formed by exploding the proprietary layer,
but repeated laser readout deformed the gold bumps, increasing the error rate to an unacceptable
level.
A more successful approach for write-once read-many-times (WORM) media was spin-coating
dye-polymer mixtures onto a glass or plastic substrate. The optics in the drive are the same as for readonly discs, so the only added requirement is a more powerful delivery of peak powers of 50100 mW
peak. Philips and Sony specied the write-once CD, later called CD-R, in their 1988 Orange Book, and
by the late 1990s the required lasers had become available and writing CD-R became the norm for
optical drives in computer systems. The wide variety of write-once media soon became a challenge,
forcing optical drive developers to develop different writing strategies for various disks and install them
in player rmware.
Magneto-optic (M-O) and phase change recording were the major contenders for rewritable
optical disks. Magneto-optics got off to a promising start in the early 1970s, based on synchronizing
laser heating (to the Curie point) of a magnetic recording medium with modulation of the magnetic eld
in the heated area. The write/read heads were complex, but the media offered an essentially unlimited
number of write/read cycles, so the systems could easily t with existing computer memory
management.
Phase-change media are purely optical systems based on a thin layer of a chalcogenide alloy, such
as AgInSbTe or GeSbTe, which can be stable in both amorphous and microcrystalline states with
different reectivities. Illumination by a short high-energy laser pulse melts the chalcogenide layer,
which cools to an amorphous state. A longer, lower-energy pulse heats the lm but does not reach the
melting point, causing crystallization of the amorphous layer, thus control of the laser prole rewrites
the material. A great deal of research from the 1970s through the 1990s went into nding the best alloy
compositions and deposition procedures.
Industry Anecdotes
The author was deeply involved in developing those systems, so he saw the dynamics that shaped their
history. As a Senior Researcher in the R&D Division of Ampex Corporation in the 1970s, he was
offered the opportunity to lead technical development of a either re-writable magneto-optic media or
write-once media. He chose the write-once group because it seemed that write-once media were
certainly as useful as ink and paper and that the dye polymer media and drives could be produced at
much lower cost than the M-O media and drives. These guesses turned out to be correct in the long run.
What was not realized at the time was that the changes in computer operating systems required to
manage read-only and write-once media would be very slow in coming. Those le-system enhancements were not standardized and implemented until the late 1980 and 1990s, when software developers
nally understood that the utility and low cost of CD-ROM, and later CD-R, made them necessary
system components.
By the mid-1980s the author was on the other side of the fence, as Manager of Optical Storage
at Apple Computer. His initial goal in joining Apple had been to develop CD-A and CD-ROM for use
with Apples computers. Steve Jobs really liked optical storage and therefore provided good support
to the CD effort. At the time, M-O developers believed the unlimited re-writeability and removability
of M-O media made it more attractive than conventional magnetic hard disk drives for computer use.
After Steve left Apple, rumors spread that his new company called NeXT was going to used M-O
drives instead of magnetic discs in its new computer. That worried Apple management, which had
great respect for Steves product judgment, so the authors group began working with a major
Japanese electronics company on M-O drives for Apple computers. As the possible performance and
costs were learned, analysis showed that computer performance would not be adequate with only a
M-O drive. The slower access time and transfer rates of M-O drives would make the computers too
sluggish for the market. Subsequent developments indicate that dropping the M-O disc was the
correct choice.
140
DVD and Blu-Ray, the 120-mm Optical

Disc Drive beyond CD
When 650-nm diode lasers became available, a group including Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Matsushita
developed 120-mm dual-layer discs with capacities of nearly 5 GB on a single-layer disc and 8.5 GB on a
dual-layer disc. New video codecs could generate decent NTSC/PAL video from an average bit rate of
4 Mb/s and a maximum bit rate of 11 Mb/s. The new standard also transported video data in blocks just
like computer data, avoiding the differences that had existed between CD-A and CD-ROM. After
resolving some last minute engineering issues regarding copy protection, Hollywood put their content
on the new discs, and DVD became an incredibly successful consumer product for all concerned.
The DVD standard is almost purely raising all the bars from CDs. Shorter-wavelength lasers,
better error correction codes, and more powerful VLSI chips are all evolutionary developments
resulting from many person years of
R&D. This history shows that evolutionary engineering developments can produce
revolutionary effects. CD capacity is not
large enough to support video; DVD can
support video. A modern personal computer operating system will just t on a
dual-layer DVD; it would require 12 CDs
or 5400 oppy disks.
Because CD usage remained quite
strong, the new optical drives needed optics and electronics to support both 780 nm
for CD and 650 nm for DVD. Typically
the multi-wavelength optics use dichroic
beamsplitters to combine optical axes
Fig. 2. Twenty-year evolution of optical disc product
through a single objective lens. In some
capabilities.
Table 1.
Twenty-Year Evolution of Optical Disc Product Capabilities
1988 Optical Disc Drive (AppleCD SC)

Volume of optical drive mechanism and electronics 122.2 cu''
Volume of OPU 1.5 cu''
Media types
CD-A
CD-ROM
Maximum Read Speed

1 audio play only
2
No Writing Capability
2008 Optical Disc Drive (Apple Superdrive)

Volume of optical drive mechanism and electronics 11 cu''
Volume of OPU 0.3 cu''
Media types
CD-A
CD-ROM
CD-R
CD-RW
DVD Video one layer
DVD-Video dual layer
DVD-ROM one layer
DVD-ROM dual layer
DVD-R one layer
DVD-R dual layer
DVD+R one layer
DVD+R dual layer
DVD-RW
DVD+RW
Max. Read Speed

24
24
24
24
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
Max. Write Speed

24
16
8
6
8
6
6
8
141
Table 2.
History of 120-mm Disc Physical Parameters by Standard
Standard Name
Product Introduction
Laser Wavelength
Objective Numerical Aperture
Cover Layer Thickness
Track Pitch
Minimum Mark Length
Single Layer Capacity
Number of layers
Disc Capacity
CD
DVD
Blu-Ray
1982
780 nm
0.5
1.2 mm
1.6 m
0.80 m
0.80 GB
1
0.74 GB
1995
650 nm
0.6
0.6 mm
0.74 m
0.40 m
4.7 GB
2
8.5 GB
2003
405 nm
0.85
0.1 mm
0.32 m
0.15 m
25 GB
2
50 GB
cases the lens is actually a dual optic with a high-numerical-aperture (NA) annular zone giving a
small 650-nm spot and a smaller-NA region focusing 780 nm light to a larger spot.
Decades of research and development have dramatically reduced size and increased capabilities.
Figure 2 and Tables 1 and 2 compare size and specications of optical drives from 1988 to 2010. For
demonstration, the top lid of the 2008 drive has been removed, and an unnished 120 mm disc
(metallization layer not yet applied) has been placed on the spindle. The optical pickup is visible
through the still transparent disc.
The bar was raised even further in 2006 with introduction of the Blu-Ray drive product, based on
the development with 405-nm lasers. Evolution in every aspect of the technology, as shown in Table 2,
created a dual-layer 120-mm disc with 50-gigabyte capacitywhich would have been unthinkable four
decades earlier. Blu-Ray can support high denition video with four times as many pixels as NTSC/PAL
video.
The future of optical disc use and development will be strongly affected by other technologies. Will
consumers accept the lower-quality video distributed over the Internet or insist on the quality delivered
by a 120-mm HD Blu-Ray disc? Optical discs with properly made media are as archival as silver halide,
so what role will they play in archiving the data our society continues to generate at an accelerating
rate?
References
1. A. Kees, I. Schouhamer, and I. Immink, The CD story, J. Audio Eng. Soc. 46, 458465 (1998).
2. M. G. Carasso, J. B. H. Peek, and J. P. Sinjou, The Compact Disc Digital Audio system, Philips Tech.
Rev. 40(6), 150156 (1982).
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19601974

James C. Wyant
asers have made truly revolutionary changes in optical metrology. The lasers small
source size and narrow linewidth made it so much easier to obtain good contrast
interference fringes that applications of interferometric optical metrology have increased
immensely during the 50 years since the laser was rst developed. Single-mode frequencystabilized lasers provided a standard for dimensional metrology, while ultra-short pulsed lasers
have enabled high-resolution range nding.
The laser has greatly enhanced the testing of optical components and systems. Before the
laser, the use of interferometry in optical testing was limited because either the interferometer
paths had to be matched or the source size had to be very small to have good spatial coherence,
and the lters needed to reduce spectral width left very little light for measurements. Once the
laser was introduced, Bob Hopkins from the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester
was quick to realize how much laser light could improve the testing of optical components [1],
and he encouraged other researchers to design laser source optical interferometers [26]. By 1967
lasers had become common in optical testing [7,8]. Figure 1 shows a laser unequal path
interferometer (LUPI) designed by John Buccini and manufactured by Itek in the late 1960s
and early 1970s.
Abe Offner from Perkin Elmer was quick to realize that adding null correctors to laser
interferometers would allow measurements of optical components with aspheric surfaces [9]. Null
correctors are a combination of lenses and mirrors having spherical surfaces, but when used in the
proper way they produce an aspheric wavefront that matches the surface of an aspheric optic,
producing interferograms with straight equally spaced fringes when the tested aspheric surface is
perfect. Unfortunately, that use of null correctors received horrible publicity after initial orbital
tests of the Hubble Space Telescope showed its optics could not be brought to the expected sharp
focus. Analysis of the awed images showed that the primary mirror had an incorrect shape.
A commission headed by Lew Allen, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, determined that the
null corrector used to test the primary mirror had been assembled incorrectlyone lens was
1.3 mm from its proper position [10]. That caused the null corrector to produce an incorrect
aspheric wavefront, so using it to test the primary mirror led to fabricating the mirror with the
wrong shape. In correcting the error, the cost was more than a billion dollars to design and
fabricate additional optics and install them on the Hubble telescope from the space shuttle.
Heterodyne and Homodyne Interferometry

Heterodyne interferometry using the beat signal between two different laser frequencies permits
the measurement of changes in distances or variations of surface height in the nanometer or
angstrom range. The two frequencies are commonly obtained from a Zeeman split laser [11],
rotating polarization components [12], or Bragg cells [13].
Homodyne interferometry using either a phase-shifting [14,15] or spatial-carrier [16]
technique is now widely used to test optics. In phase-shifting interferometry three or more
interferograms are captured where the phase difference between the two interfering beams
changes by some amount, typically 90 degrees, between consecutive interferograms. From these
three or more interferograms the phase difference between the two interfering beams can be
143
determined. In spatial-carrier interferometry a large amount of tilt is introduced

between the two interfering beams, and
the resulting interferogram is sampled such
that three or more measurements are made
per fringe.
Adding a computer to an interferometer creates a great metrology tool for use in
manufacturing many types of components
including optics, hard disk drives, machined parts, and semiconductors [17]. Figure 2 shows a phase-shifting laser-based
Fizeau interferometer manufactured by the
WYKO Corporation in the late 1980s, and
Fig. 3 shows a phase-shifting interference
microscope also manufactured by WYKO
in the mid-1980s for measuring surface
microstructure.
The great feature of phase-shifting
interferometry is that it can measure distances to nanometer or even angstrom
accuracy, but it only measures phase over
a range of 2 and wraps if the phase varies
Fig. 1. Laser unequal path TwymanGreen interferometer,
often called a LUPI (1970).
by more than 2. The phase can be
unwrapped if it varies slowly, but not if
the surface has large steps or discontinuities. The problem arises from the monochromaticity of the laser light used in the
measurement. One way to get around the
unwrapping problem is to measure a surface at two or more wavelengths and observe how the phase changes when the
wavelength is changed [18]. A second approach is to observe how the phase
changes as the frequency changes when
using a tunable laser source [19]. A third
approach is to reduce temporal coherence
of the source and observe how fringe visibility changes as the path difference between the two interfering beams changes
[20]. It is interesting that the use of a lowcoherence-length source, essentially white
Fig. 2. Laser-based phase-shifting Fizeau interferometer
light, is the same approach Michelson used
having both a 6-in. and a 12-in. aperture (late 1980s).
more than a hundred years ago. The modern addition of electronics, computers, and software make the technique much more powerful and
useful for a wider variety of applications.
Holographic Interferometry and Speckle Metrology

The laser allowed optical interferometry to expand to include interference of random optical elds
scattered from diffuse surfaces. For example, the coherence of laser light is essential in holographic
interferometry [21] and speckle metrology [22]. One example is using holographic interferometry to
144
measure deformation, rst discovered and

described by Karl Stetson [23]. First a
hologram is recorded of a three-dimensional (3D) object, and then the object is
deformed so light from the reconstructed
hologram can interfere with the optical
eld from the deformed object to yield
interference fringes showing how the object was deformed. One particularly good
application of such holographic nondestructive testing is the testing of automotive and aircraft tires pioneered by Gordon
Brown [24]. Changing tire pressure slightly between two holographic exposures
causes small bulges in weak areas that
show up very clearly in the resulting holographic interferogram.
Time-averaged holography effectively
Fig. 3. Phase-shifting interference microscope for measuring
measures surface vibration [25]. A holosurface microstructure (1985).
gram is made of a vibrating surface over a
time long compared with the vibration
period. Interference fringes are recorded from the nodes of the vibration but are washed out by
movement of the vibrating part of the surface. The result is a fringe contour map showing the location
of the vibration nodes.
Two-wavelength holography can be used to contour surfaces [26]. One technique starts by
recording a hologram of a surface using a wavelength, 1. Then both the surface being contoured
and the hologram are illuminated with a second wavelength, 2, and the optical wavefront reconstructed by the hologram is interfered with the optical wavefront from the object being illuminated with
wavelength 2. The resulting interference pattern gives the shape of the surface being measured at a
synthetic wavelength, eq given by 1 2/(12). Diffuse surfaces can be contoured as long as eq is large
compared with surface roughness.
Solid-state detectors now have sufcient resolution to record a hologram on a high-resolution
image detector, and a computer can reconstruct the optical eld [27]. Phase-shifting interferometric
holography can measure deformation and vibrations and can contour complex surfaces by using
multiple wavelengths.
Computer generated holograms (CGHs), invented by Adolf Lohmann [28], have become common
in the laser interferometric testing of aspheric surfaces [29]. Aspheric surfaces have become common in
optical systems because they can produce better images with fewer optical elements than spherical
surfaces. A computer can calculate a CGH to provide a reference wavefront, and an electron-beam
recorder can fabricate the CHG. Then the CGH is put into the laser interferometer to produce the
required reference wavefront. The use of CGHs with laser interferometers has helped to greatly improve
modern optical systems.
Speckle photography and the interferometer are closely related to holographic interferometry.
Illuminating a rough surface with a laser beam produces a grainy distribution of light, resulting from
coherent superposition of the random optical elds scattered by the rough surface. Originally
considered a nuisance, this speckle pattern was later recognized as containing information about
the light-scattering surface. For example, the contrast of the speckles can give information about the
roughness of the surface [30]. Speckle contrast as a function of position can give vibration
information [31]. Deforming the surface changes the speckle pattern by changing optical pathlengths,
and comparing speckle patterns before and after deformation can determine distribution of the
deformation [32].
Speckle metrology has become more and more useful as high-resolution image sensors and
software analysis programs have improved.
145
Improved Measurement Capability

Lasers make it easy to get interference fringes, but sometimes they can generate fringes from stray beams
in an interferometric setup. For example, surface reections during the transmission measurement of a
glass plate can produce spurious interference fringes that greatly reduce accuracy. Using a lowtemporal-coherence source and matching the two arms of the interferometer can get around this, but
matching the lengths of the two arms can be difcult and reduce the usefulness of the interferometer. A
better approach is to add an optical delay line that splits the source beam into two components and
allows a controllable path difference between the two beams. That eliminates both the spurious
interference fringes and the need to match the test and reference beam pathlengths [33].
The environment affects phase-shifting interferometry, and in many cases, especially in
manufacturing situations or testing large telescope optics, it can limit accuracy or sometimes even
prevent measurements. The problem is that in conventional phase-shifting interferometry three or more
interferograms are obtained at different times for which the phase difference between the two
interfering beams changes by 90 degrees between consecutive interferograms. Vibrations can cause
incorrect phase changes between consecutive interferograms. However, vibration effects can be reduced
by taking all of the phase-shifted frames simultaneously, and now high-resolution image sensors offer
several ways to obtain all of the phase-shifted frames simultaneously. One technique that works very
well is to have the test and reference beams have orthogonal circular polarizations and to put a polarizer
in front of each detector pixel. The array of polarizers are arranged in groups of four where the axis of
the polarizers are at 0, 45, 90, and 135 degrees [34]. It can be shown that the phase shift between the
two interfering beams goes as twice the angle of the polarizer [35]. In this way, four phase-shifted beams
are obtained simultaneously. As long as there is enough light to make a short exposure, the effects of
Fig. 4.
146
Three-dimension contour maps showing shape of vibrating surface as a function of time.
vibration are eliminated and precise measurements can be performed in the presence of vibration; many
measurements can be averaged to reduce the effects of air turbulence. Also, if surface shape is changing
with time, the changes in surface shape can be measured and movies can be made showing how the
surface shape changes as a function of time, as shown in Fig. 4. Techniques such as this are extremely
useful for increasing the applications of laser-based interferometric metrology.
Frequency Combs
An important recent development is the use of frequency comb lasers for determining the absolute
distance to an object. In 2005 John Hall and Theodor Hnsch shared half the Nobel Prize in physics
for development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the use of frequency comb lasers.
Frequency comb lasers [36] have the potential to revolutionize long-distance absolute measurements by allowing better than sub-micrometer accuracy of distances up to, and possibly beyond,
10,000 km. Comb lasers are pulsed (ultrafast) mode-locked lasers with a precisely controlled repetition
rate and pulse phase. Stabilizing the output of a femtosecond laser provides a spectrum of well-dened
frequencies. The periodic pulse train of a femtosecond laser generates a comb of equally spaced
frequencies for multi-wavelength interferometry. It is possible to link the time-of-ight domain of longdistance measurement with an interferometric measurement to obtain nanometer accuracy. The basic
concept is to use this incredibly regular pulse structure to measure a distance in units of the pulse
separation length. For accuracies down to the 10-m level, it is sufcient to use Time of Flight
measurement [37,38]. Sub-wavelength accuracy in the nanometer range can be obtained using spectral
interferometry where the distance is obtained by determining the slope of the phase as a function of the
optical frequency [39,40]. It is believed that distances of 500 km can be measured to accuracies better
than 50 nm.
It continues to be a very exciting time for the use of lasers in optical metrology. With the
combination of new lasers, modern detectors, computers, and software, the capabilities and applications of metrology are astonishing.
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19601974

Jeff Hecht
he laser concept emerged at an ideal time to stimulate the emission of military research
contracts. In early 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower established the Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to handle the high-risk, high-payoff projects that
cautious military bureaucrats had been avoiding. That May, ARPA director Roy Johnson told
Congress that his agencys work might lead to a death ray. That would be the weapon of
tomorrow, a step beyond the hydrogen bomb, able to destroy nuclear-armed ballistic missiles
before they reached their targets.
Thus it was no wonder that ARPA welcomed Gordon Gould and Lawrence Goldmuntz
with open arms when they came bearing a proposal to build a laser in early 1959. As Gould
told the author many years later, Ray guns and so on were part of science ction, but
somebody actually proposing to build this thing? And he has theoretical grounds for believing
its going to work? Wow! That set them off, and, those colonels, they were just too eager to
believe. (See Fig. 1.)
Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow were the rst to propose the laser publicly, but their
vision was a modest-power oscillator. Gould had realized that the amplication of stimulated
emission in an oscillator might allow a laser to generate high power and concentrate light to a
high intensity. His pitch to ARPA was laden with bold ideas. He said a laser pulse could mark
military targets and measure their ranges for other weapons. He predicted that laser beams could
be focused to be 10,000 times brighter than the Sun, enough to trigger chemical reactions.
Ultimately, he suggested, lasers might be powerful enough to destroy targets or ignite nuclear
fusion.
Paul Adams, who handled ARPAs optics projects, loved the plan, and a review panel
thought prospects for laser communications, target designation, and range nding were good
enough to justify the $300,000 grant requested. Adams was so enthusiastic that he pushed
through a $999,000 contract for a bigger program at TRG Inc., the company Goldmuntz
headed. Then the Pentagon tossed a monkey wrench into the works by classifying the laser
project and denying Gould a security clearance because of his youthful dalliance with communism. He could not work on the project he had created.
The press also focused on the idea of laser weapons. When Ted Maiman announced he had
made the rst laser, reporters asked if the laser was a death ray. After trying to duck the
question, he nally admitted he could not rule out the possibility. When he returned to
California, he found the Los Angeles Herald carrying a headline in two-inch red type: L.A.
Man Discovers Science Fiction Death Ray.
After Maimans success, ARPA expanded its program to study laser mechanisms, materials,
and beam interactions with targets. The Air Force gave Maiman a contract to develop ruby
lasers, and other military labs started their own laser projects. The armed services focused on
near-term applications in missile guidance and communications; ARPA focused on high-energy
laser weapons.
Although many physicists were skeptical, they also hesitated to oppose Pentagon plans.
After weapon scientists said nuclear re-entry vehicles were so sensitive to thermal shock that laser
heating might shatter them, ARPAs laser-weapon budget was boosted to $5 million. Air Force
Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay jumped on the laser bandwagon, saying on 28 March 1962
that beam directed energy weapons would be able to transmit energy across space with the
149
speed of light and bring about the technological

disarmament of nuclear weapons. The Air Force
Systems Command budgeted $27 million for a veyear Project Blackeye to develop ground-based
anti-satellite lasers and perhaps a space-based laser
weapon.
But early laser technology was not up to the
task. American Optical pushed neodymium-glass
lasers to generate 35-J pulses, but thermal effects
shattered the rods. The same happened to ruby
rods when Westinghouse pushed Q-switched pulse
energy to 60 to 80 J. Discouraged, ARPA scaled
down its solid-state laser weapon program around
1965.
By that time, the carbon-dioxide laser was
showing hints that gas lasers could reach high
Fig. 1. Gordon Gould. Courtesy of Geoffrey Gould,
powersand could conduct away troublesome
1940.
heat. C. Kumar N. Patel generated 200 watts
continuous wave from CO2 at 10 m in mid-1965. That was enough to satisfy his research needs,
but it only whet the appetites of military labs, which began scaling CO2 lasers to impractical sizes.
Hughes reached 1.5 kW using a 10-m oscillator followed by a 54-m amplier.
The real breakthrough to high-energy lasers was the gasdynamic laser, developed by Arthur
Kantrowitz and Ed Gerry at the Avco Everett Research Laboratory near Boston. They knew that
sustained laser power would have to reach a megawatt to damage a military targetand gured they
might reach that level by drawing 0.1% of the energy from a rocket engine, which could generate a
gigawatt by burning chemical fuel to generate hot CO2. Expanding the gas through special nozzles at
supersonic speed produced a population inversion. It was a very simple thing, but not a very efcient
laser, recalled Gerry. First demonstrated in 1966, the gasdynamic laser was kept classied until
1970. By then Avco had exceeded 100 kW, although Gerry was only allowed to report 50 kW at
the time.
That power level attracted interest from the armed forces, and Avco built three 150-kW
gasdynamic lasers, one for each of them. Moving targets proved a challenge. When the Air Force
tried to hit a drone ying gure-eight patterns, the beam locked onto a weather tower and melted it. In
1973, the laser nally shot down a weakened drone. The next step was squeezing a 400-kW gasdynamic
laser into a military version of a Boeing 707 to make the Airborne Laser Laboratory. Two years after an
embarrassingly public failure in 1981, it nally shot down an air-to-air missile over the Naval Weapons
Center in China Lake, California. That was the end of the line for the gasdynamic laser, a monster
of such size and complexity that critics called it a
ten-ton watch.
After the Big Demonstration Laser built by
TRW exceeded 100 kW, the Navy focused its
attention on chemical lasers because moist air
transmits better at the 3.6- to 4.0-m band of
deuterium uoride. In 1978, the 400-kW Navy
ARPA Chemical Laser (NACL) became the rst
chemical laser to shoot down a missile in ight.
TRW then built the rst megawatt-class laser, the
Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) (Fig. 2). The giant laser, nished in 1980,
could emit 2 MW, but only for seconds at a time.
Focusing that tremendous power through the air to
a moving target proved an overwhelming chal Fig. 2. MIRACL. Courtesy of U.S. Army Space and
lenge, and by the early 1980s the armed services
Missile Defense Command.
150
had lost their enthusiasm for deploying laser

weapons.
DARPA, renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1972, had spent the
1970s trying to develop high-energy lasers at short
wavelengths. Projects included x-ray, free-electron,
and excimer lasers. At the end of the decade,
DARPA proposed building three testbeds for testing space-based defense against a nuclear missile
attack: a high-frequency laser called Alpha emitting
5 MW at 2.7 m, a 4-m high-power space mirror
called the Large Optics Demonstration Experiment
(LODE), and a pointing and tracking system called
Talon Gold.
Fig. 3. Space-based x-ray laser art. Courtesy of
Then Lockheed engineer Max Hunter proLawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
posed an even bolder plan, using that technology
to build a eet of 18 orbiting chemical laser battle
stations to block a Soviet nuclear attack. He
claimed that 17,000-kg satellites could carry the
laser, the optics, and enough fuel to re 1000 shots
at targets at targets up to 5000 km away, and
proposed launching them on the space shuttle.
Senator Malcolm Wallop embraced the plan and
in 1979 claimed it could be built for $10 billion.
Ronald Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative
took over the DARPA space laser projects in 1983,
envisioning them as part of a multi-layer defense
system designed to block a Soviet nuclear attack.
SDI also poured money into plans for
space-based x-ray lasers (Fig. 3) and massive
Fig. 4. Inside view of Joint High Power Solid State
ground-based free-electron lasers to be paired with
Laser (JHPSSL). Courtesy of U.S. Army Space and
orbiting relay mirrors. Most of the laser communiMissile Defense Command.
ty was skepticalto say the leastbut SDI spending on optics peaked around $1 billion a year in the
mid-1980s, including optics for beam direction, target tracking and other purposes, as well as highenergy lasers.
A ground-based demonstration of the Alpha laser achieved megawatt-class output in 1991, but
after the end of the Cold War, most of the big high-energy laser missile defense programs faded away.
They were replaced by a missile defense program that at the time seemed more realistic than orbiting
laser battle stations: the Airborne Laser. The plan called for installing a megawatt-class chemical
oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) in a modied Boeing 747 to defend against a few missiles launched by a
rogue state such as North Korea. Emitting at 1.3 m, the COIL included an adaptive optics system
designed to deliver lethal power to missiles rising through the atmosphere up to a few hundred
kilometers away. After falling several years behind schedule, it destroyed two test missiles in February
2010, but results fell far short of operational requirements, and the program was canceled.
Ironically, as the Airborne Laser faltered in the 2000s, dramatic advances in diode-pumped solidstate lasers opened the door to a new class of laser weapons, vehicle-mounted systems powered
electrically rather than by special chemical fuels. They are designed to stop rocket, artillery, and mortar
attacks by detonating the munitions in the air at ranges to a few kilometers. A key demonstration was
the Joint High Power Solid State Laser (JHPSSL) (Fig. 4), a diode-pumped neodymium-slab laser built
by Northrop Grumman, which red 100 kW continuous wave for ve minutes in March 2009. More
recently, the multi-kilowatt beams from several industrial ber lasers have been combined and used to
shoot down rockets.
151
Big challenges remain in making high-energy lasers that can re reliably on the battleeld, with key
issues including keeping the optics clean, avoiding optical damage, buiding durable cooling systems,
and making the lasers reliable and affordable. But the task is also vastly easier than SDIs goal of
building orbiting battle stations capable of blocking a massive Soviet nuclear attack.
Note: This article was adapted from [1].
Reference
1. J. Hecht, A half century of laser weapons, Opt. Photon. News 20(2), 1421 (2009).
152
19601974
KH-9 Hexagon Spy in the Sky

Reconnaissance Satellite
Phil Pressel
n 1965, Central Intelligence Agency Director John McCone laid down a challenge to a
selected few companies with experience in designing cameras for the intelligence community.
He wanted a new generation of surveillance satellites that combined the broad area coverage
of CORONA with the high resolution of the KH-7 GAMBIT.
Thus was born what would eventually become the KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite. It was the
last lm-based orbiting reconnaissance camera for the United States government. It was a
marvel of engineering achievements that resulted in a ne optical instrument that was capable
of taking stereo photographs of the entire earth as well as concentrating on small areas of
interest and able to distinguish objects two to three feet in size from an altitude of 90 miles
above the earth. The system would become an invaluable asset and provided intelligence
information credited with persuading President Nixon to sign the SALT-1 treaty in 1972. It
was also acknowledged at the time to have been the most complicated system ever put into
orbit. The rst launch was on 15 June 1971 and the last of 19 successful missions sadly
exploded 800 feet above the pad on 18 April 1986 just a few months after the tragic Challenger
explosion.
The vehicle weighed 30,000 pounds, was 60 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, and each of
the two cameras carried 30 miles of lm. The lm traveled at speeds up to 204 in./s at the focal
plane and was perfectly synchronized to the optical image captured by a constantly rotating
scanning camera. The exposed lm was periodically returned to Earth in four re-entry vehicles
caught by an Air Force C-130 over the Pacic. A photograph of the entire vehicle and a schematic
diagram of the vehicle are shown in Figs. 1 and 2, respectively.
The story started out as the author was working for the Perkin-Elmer Corporation, and with
a small group who studied the concept for over a year. The results were presented to the CIA at
night in an innocuous-looking safe house in Washington, DC. Albert Bud Wheelon, the rst
CIA Deputy Director of Science and Technology (from 1963 to 1966) said that the agency
thought highly of the groups concept.
The group then spent an extremely intense six weeks writing a proposal. It culminated in
May 1966 when Perkin-Elmer CEO Chester Nimitz, Jr., the son of the famous World War II
admiral, stood up at the end of the nal proposal presentation to the CIA, put his foot up on a
table and said, We want this fg job and were gonna get every fg agency and every
fg engineer from here to Florida. We recognize the importance to national security and
were capable of doing the job. It was a memorable event.
A second memorable event came ve months later on 10 October 1966, when the group was
told to gather at 10 a.m. in the large engineering room, in an isolated and secure area across the
street from one of Perkin-Elmers two main plants. Group vice president Dick Werner, the
groups program manager Mike Maguire, and contract specialist Charley Hall walked in shortly
after 10. They were all dressed in stylish suits. In those days everyone wore ties and jackets,
although the latter were soon discarded as each day progressed. As they reached the front of the
room Dick reached into his right inside jacket pocket and took out one of the longest cigars
imaginable. The rst words out of his mouth were We won. A great cheer went up from the
153
group. Dick and Mike then each spoke a

few words of praise for the great team
effort along with wishes for success in this
new adventure.
As soon as the meeting broke up,
group members immediately made phone
calls. Many called their wives to say that
Fig. 1. Photo of the Hexagon vehicle (minus 2 re-entry lm
the group had won a big program that
capsules).
would keep them employed for a long
time.
Some employees called their stockbrokers to buy as much Perkin-Elmer stock
as they could afford. Of course, this was
illegal as it was trading using insider information. The next day a secretary went
around asking everyone if they had purchased shares and if so, how many. This
list was eventually given to the PerkinElmer legal department, and all who had
bought stock expected to be reprimanded
Fig. 2. Schematic of the entire Hexagon vehicle.
and possibly made to sell the shares or void
the purchases. But nothing further was
heard, and it turned out to be a lucrative investment, especially for those who had the courage to
invest serious funds. The company stock split seven times in the next dozen years.
Hiring a skilled technical staff was difcult because the program was top secret, so potential
candidates could not be told the nature of the program or the specic tasks to which they would be
assigned. In addition, completing the required background and security checks took from four months
to a year, and permanent employment depended on clearing security screening.
New hires were told not to discuss or even speculate with others what the program was about.
While awaiting their clearances, most of them worked on unclassied projects in a non-secure part of
the building called the tank. It also was called the mushroom patch, because the people working
there were kept in the dark and fed a lot of crap.
Everyone in the tank eagerly awaited their security clearance. Dick Carritol, a systems and
servomechanism engineer, recalls being called to the security ofce. I was given a bunch of documents
to read and sign. I remember being awed by the words I was reading. It seemed like I was being told
more than I needed to know. After 40 years the memory is a little hazy, but I do remember something
like this: : : : a study program leading to the design and development of a photo reconnaissance
satellite, to conduct covert operations for the CIA, under cover as the Discoverer Program. This high
resolution system is to carry out search and surveillance missions over the Sino-Soviet Bloc : : : the
program name is FULCRUM. (It later was changed to Hexagon.)
Carritol continues: The documents droned on about not revealing, acknowledging, or commenting on the existence of the program, the program name, the customers name, or any of the participants
in the program. This ban on discussion included everyone from ones family and friends all the way to
others on the program with the proper security clearance but without an explicit need to know.
When I had nished all the reading and signing, the security ofcer asked if I was surprised. I
didnt have a feeling of surprise. I felt numb. I had just read a lot of words and concepts that I had never
considered before. Covert Operations, Under Cover, Search and Surveillance of the Sino-Soviet Bloc,
and compartmentalized security clearances were all new and quite foreign to me. I had a lot to learn!
No, I didnt feel surprise, I felt like I had just joined the Big Leagues.
The design environment in the late 1960s was very different from that of today. Computers were
large general-purpose mainframes which received input on punched cards and produced output on
magnetic tape or an impact printer. Analysis programs were limited to early versions of NASTRAN (for
mechanical structural analysis) and SINDA (for thermal analysis).
154
There were no CAD (computer aided

design) systems. Designs were drawn on
drafting boards using pencils, and major
changes required much erasing or starting
a new drawing from scratch. Large
machines that used ammonia and other
chemicals copied the drawings to make
real blueprints. The smell of ammonia
permeated the blueprinting department,
and copies retained the odor for quite a
while. There were no graphic printers or
displays, and drawings could not be rotated on a screen and nor parts observed in
Fig. 3. The optical bar.
three dimensions. Most engineers did math
on slide rules or desktop calculators; pocket electronic calculators did not arrive until
the early 1970s. By modern standards, the
tools used for testing, visualizing, and analyzing, and in some cases for fabrication,
were antiques.
Each camera, called the optical bar,
was an f/3 folded Wright optical system
with a focal length of 60 in (152.4 cm). Its
conguration is shown in Fig. 3.
Each of the two identical optical bars
contained an entrance window, a fold-at
mirror, a 26-in. primary mirror, and a eld
group of lenses. The mirrors were 4 in.
thick and made of two faceplates fused to a
hollowed-out core and made by the Heraeus Corporation. Perkin-Elmer polished
them to an rms wavefront quality of
1/50th of a wave. The image was imposed
Fig. 4. Two-camera-assembly isometric.
on the focal plane located 1 in. behind the
last lens. One optical bar was tilted 10 deg to look forward, and the other 10 deg to look back, creating
a 20-degree stereo angle. A two-camera-assembly isometric is shown in Fig. 4.
The optical bars rotated continuously in opposite directions during photography, as did the other
major rotating components of the vehicle, for momentum compensation. They rotated at a constant
speed depending on V/h (the orbital velocity divided by the altitude above the earth). Photographic
imaging occurred only during scans of 60 degrees or less on either side of nadir (looking straight
down). During photographic scans the lms linear velocity and rotational speed (that was also a
function of V/h) in the platen had to be synchronized exactly with the moving image.
The lm exited the supply reels at a constant velocity of 70 in./s. After the lm left the supply, it had
to be moved in accordance with a prescribed lm velocity prole to enable photography to occur at the
proper time and to utilize as much of the lm as possible. The lm path, shown in Fig. 5, was
approximately 100 feet long and contained many rollers over which the lm traveled. The lm was
accelerated to photographic speed in the platen.
The platen was the assembly that controlled lm speed and synchronization with the image at the
focal plane. At perigee, the lowest point in the satellites orbit, the lm speed was 204 in./s. After the
exposure occurred, the lm was decelerated and driven backward so that the next exposure was made
with only 2 in. of lm between exposures. The lm was then stopped so that an electronic data block
could be inscribed on the lm in this narrow space. At altitudes higher than perigee, all of the lm and
camera rotational speeds slowed down proportionately.
155
The oscillating portion of the platen

was synchronized to the rotating portion
of the optical bar. The real key to the
success of the Hexagon camera system was
the invention of the twister. This relatively
simple device consisted of a few rollers and
two pivoted air bars (D-shaped cylinders
through which dry nitrogen passed, enabling the lm to ride linearly and up and
down on a thin air gap without incurring
damage). The twister was a self-aligning,
passive device that allowed the lm to be
rotated in synchronization with the optical
bar during photography.
The job of accommodating the lm
velocity
prole from constant low velocity
Fig. 5. Overall system lm path schematic (cameras not
at the supply to variable high speed at the
shown).
focal plane in the platen and storing the
lm during the non-photographic cycle (240 deg or more) of the optical bar was accomplished by
means of a lm storage device called the looper. It contained a carriage and many rollers. The carriage
traveled linearly back and forth. During motion in one direction it drew the proper quantity of lm
from the supply reels into the entrance side of the looper while simultaneously feeding lm into the
platen for exposure.
After exposure the lm during the reverse motion was stored in the exit side of the looper. It was
then wound up at constant velocity again at 70 in./s onto the take-up assembly in the forward section of
the vehicle. After the rst of four take-up reels (each in its own re-entry vehicle) was lled, the lm was
wound and cinched onto the core of the next take-up reel then cut. At the appropriate time during one
of the next orbits the lled re-entry vehicle was jettisoned and returned to earth.
It took almost ve years of development and testing to reach the next big date, which was 15 June
1971. The author sat next to Mike Maguire, the groups director and general manager, and several
others in the war room listening to the Vandenberg launch controller countdown to ignition and
liftoff of a Titan 3D rocket with about 3 million pounds of thrust. Silence followed, then periodic
updates on altitude and speed. Eventually the controller conrmed that the payload had reached orbit.
It would be the rst of 19 successful launches.
Known to the public as Big Bird, Hexagon succeeded beyond anyones dreams. The program
helped ease Cold War tensions and became the most successful lm-based spy satellite the United States
ever orbited. It was eventually succeeded by electronic digital imaging systems that could deliver images
to the ground much faster than possible with lm.
The last date etched in the authors memory was 18 April 1986. For the twentieth time, the
countdown was heard: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, ve, four, three, two, one, launch, we have liftoff.
A noisy and powerful exhaust came from the rocket as it rose off the pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base
in California. Then disaster happened. The rocket exploded in a ery blast before it reached 1,000 feet,
destroying the last Hexagon. Those who worked on the program could not share their stories for
another quarter century, until the National Reconnaissance Ofce nally declassied the program in a
17 September 2011 ceremony attended by the author along with many colleagues who had worked on
the Hexagon project.
This chapter was based on [1].
Reference
1. P. Pressel, Spy in the sky: the KH-9 Hexagon, Opt. Photon. News 24(10), 2835 (2013).
156
19601974

Kevin Thompson
he CORONA program came at a time when classied optics programs were in their
steepest ascent toward a mission to literally save the world. But very few people realized it
at the time because it was among the most classied of all classied programs. Outside of
a team of fewer than 100 scientists, at one point only six people, including President Eisenhower,
were aware of the work that together with the U2 surveillance plane helped save the world from
nuclear war. Signicantly, a single person was behind the success of both CORONA and the U2
missions: Richard Bissell of the CIA.
Initiated just weeks after the Soviet Sputnik launch, CORONA was at the cutting edge of
technology and a remarkably visionary program. It anticipated that the high-altitude U2 could be
brought down, as it would be in 1960. Its crucial role was to cast the light of knowledge onto the
dangerous shadows of speculation about Soviet capabilities. At one point, advisors told
Eisenhower that the U.S. needed 10,000 nuclear warheads to catch up. The U2 and CORONA
together provided hard evidence that if there was a missile gap, it was the Soviets who were
behind. The rst successful CORONA mission acquired ten times more information than all of
the preceding U2 missions combined. Eisenhowers visionary program was a credit to his
presidency, and kept President Kennedy from overreacting to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
The saga of CORONA has been the subject of a number of good books since its
declassication in 2004. A major reference for this article was ITEK and the CIA [1], which
offers a substantial, factual account of the CORONA program. The most readable history of
CORONA, which covers many of the technical and operational issues, is Eye in the Sky: The
Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites edited by Day, Logsdon, and Latell [2], in the Smithsonian
History of Aviation Series. Another important resource for this essay was a plenary talk given at
the 2004 SPIE annual meeting by (the late) Robert S. Hilbert, one of the principal optical
engineers on CORONA for nearly a decade before becoming the leader of Optical Research
Associates. The author worked with him for nearly 20 years.
CORONA, like the U2, proceeded from concept to ight hardware in a matter of months, an
incomprehensible pace today. The multidisciplinary team of engineers and scientists were armed
primarily with slide rules and engineering judgment, and they had only limited computer
simulation capabilities. But they were unencumbered by any signicant management or budget
constraints and were driven by genuine personal urgency to move ahead at a pace that was
perhaps matched only by the earlier U2 program at the Burbank Skunk Works. The engineering
team, fortuitously, had been together for some years. Nearly all had worked at a reconnaissance
research facility at Boston University. The university was in a nancial crisis when Eisenhower
commissioned CORONA and was disbanding the reconnaissance group, which was quickly
bought by the newly formed Itek Corporation, formed with funding from David Rockefeller.
Rockefeller was an outspoken conservative who decided that if he would not implement his
vision of a better world politically, he would create it by backing key technologies that enabled
his goals. He was a visionary who saw that gaining knowledge of the unknown was a key to
ensuring the future. At the time, Eisenhower was crippled by having no information at all about
vast expanses of adversarial countries. This lack of knowledge led to speculation that potential
adversaries had vast arsenals, as well as strong pressure from the military, the press, and the
public to arm the U.S. well beyond its means. Eisenhower made a key decision, that knowledge at
any monetary cost was the best option.
157
Rockefellers role was vital because the president could not directly ensure that Itek had the
nancial resources needed for the program. Because Eisenhowers key military advisors knew nothing
about CORONA, he was continually challenged as being indecisive in ways that were clearly rational in
light of the super-secret project. As one of the six people briefed on the program outside of Itek,
Rockefeller understood this. However, he was the only Rockefeller briefed, and Itek needed so much
nancing that he had to involve his brothers. This led to some suspense in the story of Itek, but in the
end all the Rockefellers investedand reaped the nancial benets by a timely exit from Itek before
Perkin-Elmer won a vital contract for the follow-on Hexagon (Big Bird) program.
Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid, was a second key technology advisor and an important link
between the optics community and the president. At a time when the Air Force was pushing for a rstof-its-kind crash program in electronic imagery from space, it is likely, but unveried, that Land kept
the CORONA mission rmly based in lm (although the lm was to come from Kodak). Although the
program was Eisenhowers highest priority, its classication level made it impossible to get priority
access to new technology, in particular a critical polyester base lm from Kodak. After the project
stalled because it lacked the special lm they needed, Bissell quietly intervened and a large batch
suddenly arrived.
The exposed lm had to be returned to Earth for processing, so it was jettisoned in a capsule that
was supposed to be caught in the air by a C-130 aircraft. To make sure the lm did not fall into the
wrong hands, the capsules had salt plug seals that dissolved in an hour to drop them to the bottom of
the sea. Only the lm returned to earth, so each mission needed a new camera. The logistics of this were
staggering.
The CORONA program became the denition of perseverance, determination, and perhaps
desperation. The crash program went through a long series of failures, often with the rocket simply
blowing up on the launch pad, a problem not related to CORONA. That might be expected at the
beginning of the space age, but for a year it set a grueling pace for the scientists. Bob Hilbert would
typically arrive at the ofce between 10 a.m. and noon for technical meetings and exchanges and then
work through to midnight. At midnight, he would put on his optics engineer hat and work on computer
simulations until 4 a.m. because the computer time was too expensive at other hours. His wife always
had his dinner prepared when he arrived, at 4:15 a.m., seven days a week.
The stakes were raised after the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 over Siberia on 1 May 1960,
stopping ights that had been the best source of surveillance data. On 10 August, the fourteenth
CORONA launch successfully orbited a capsule carrying an American ag, but the recovery aircraft
ew in the wrong direction. Fortunately, a Navy ship was able to retrieve the capsule. The next launch
came on 18 August, carrying a camera that operated successfully and ejected lm that was successfully
recovered.
The composite graphic in Fig. 1 gives a good overview of the CORONA equipment. Instead of
stabilizing the capsule by spinning it in orbit, which would make photography difcult, Itek scientists
stabilized it with small microjets. The camera itself needed to move back and forth in a pendulum-like
motion to image from side to side. These requirements prevented use of the Fairchild camera used for
imaging in the Korean War, so Itek had to design their own based on earlier ideas for a panoramic camera
for imaging large swaths of the ground by sweeping in a cross-track direction as the satellite orbited.
The chosen orbit was a northsouth one synchronous with the sun to provide maximum highlatitude coverage during daylight. Initial designs used an oscillating lens to focus the image onto a
curved platen carrying the photographic lm. Traditional aerial photography generally used long focal
lengths to produce large-scale images to record sufcient detail with the limited resolution of
photographic lm. However, the size and weight restrictions of early satellite systems limited the
focal length and the amount of lm that could be carried to orbit. CORONA had to achieve very high
resolution in a compact system constrained by lm handling and dynamic limitations.
Robert Hopkins of the Institute of Optics suggested a Petzval-type design to meet the camera
resolution requirements. Itek engineers directed by Walter Levison, Frank Madden, and Dow Smith
generated a novel Petzval design that mounted primary and large-aperture imaging components in a
constantly rotating lens barrel and put the lower-tolerance eld attening components near the focal
surface in a lightweight oscillating arm that dened the image location. These two assemblies operated
158
Fig. 1. A pair of convergent f/3.5 cameras produce stereo images of the ground on 70-mm lm, with each
frame covering 7.4 by 119 nautical miles. (Courtesy of Bob Hilbert, Itek.)
synchronously to wipe the image across the photographic lm. The lm was advanced when the lens
was rotating in a non-image collecting part of the cycle and was dynamically located relative to the lens
just at the time of exposure by rollers attached to the oscillating eld attener assembly.
The result was a minimum-weight camera that could t across the width of the spacecraft and
allowed the inclusion of two cameras to provide stereo coverage of the entire imaging swath. The
optical components also needed to exhibit appropriate lateral shifts during the panoramic scan to
provide image motion compensation and reduce along track blur in the recorded image. Additional
optics recorded stellar index images on the lm to aid geo-location of targets. The result was a
remarkable synthesis of optical, mechanical, and electrical systems that were the most complicated, and
eventually reliable, systems of their kind to be incorporated in a spacecraft at the time.
Figure 2 shows a test exposure taken from an aircraft ying over Manhattan, which illustrates the
strong distortion of the wide-panorama photos. One of Bob Hilberts key responsibilities was the
optical design and manufacture of the rectier lens based on a concept credited to Claus
Fig. 2.
Stereo cameras
used in Corona have high
resolution combined with large
intrinsic distortion, shown in this
image of Manhattan taken from
10,000 feet. (Courtesy of Bob
Hilbert, Itek.)
159
Aschenbrenner. The idea was to construct a lens that exactly reverses the distortion of the taking lens,
a very effective approach still used in cinematography. The rectier lens imaged returned lm onto a
second lm image that was corrected for panoramic scan distortion.
Once it was nally successful, CORONA went on 85 successful missions, the last launched in
1972. Its career, and that of Itek and Iteks scientists and engineers, was ended somewhat unceremoniously when the follow-on program was canceled in what was primarily a political battle and passed
on to Perkin-Elmer, who successfully developed a wide area photographic imaging system with a new
name, Hexagon, nicknamed Big Bird. Itek did later develop a precision large-format mapping camera
which ew along with many of the Hexagon missions.
CORONA optics presented challenges, but the complex lm transports represent impressive
engineering feats. The preceding article by Phil Pressel describes the lm transports used in the larger
Hexagon program, sort of a CORONA on steroids.
These pioneering optical systems are now on display. You can view a CORONA camera at the
National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Samples of the Hexagon and GAMBIT systems
are viewable at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
References
1. J. E. Lewis, Spy Capitalism: Itek and the CIA (Yale University Press, 2002).
2. D. A. Day, J. M. Logsdon, and B. Latell, Eye in the Sky: The Story of the Corona Spy Satellites
(Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).
160
19601974

Jeff Hecht
he idea of laser isotope enrichment grew from the lasers ability to concentrate its output
power in a narrow range of wavelengths. Different isotopes of the same element are very
hard or impossible to separate chemically, but the difference in their masses leads to
differences in their spectra, which in principle can be used to selectively excite one isotope and
isolate it by some photo-induced process.
The rst proposal came from the Atomic Energy Commissions (AECs) Mound Laboratories in Miamisburg, Ohio, which in 1961 began a classied investigation of using lasers to enrich
the concentration of ssionable uranium-235. Others independently proposed laser uranium
enrichment. A company called Radioptics proposed it to the AEC in 1963 and later unsuccessfully sued the AEC for violating their trade secrets. A French group received a patent in France in
1965, and by the time a U.S. version of the patent issued in 1969 the idea was looking attractive.
The impetus came from the development of the tunable dye laser and the growth of nuclear
power. The U.S. depended on the gaseous diffusion process developed during World War II to
enrich U-235 concentration to the levels needed for atomic bombs. Gaseous diffusion is energyintensive, expensive, and raises U-235 concentration only a small amount on each pass. Laser
enrichment offered to reduce cost, improve efciency, and increase recovery of U-235.
At the Avco-Everett Research Laboratory, Richard Levy and G. Sargent Janes developed a
two-step process to enrich U-235. First a dye laser would selectively excite U-235 atoms in
uranium vapor, then an ultraviolet laser would ionize the excited U-235 atoms, so they could be
collected [1]. (Figure 1 shows the process.) Avco lacked money to develop the technology, so they
formed a joint venture with Exxon Nuclear, hoping to build a private uranium enrichment
business.
Avco-Everett founder Arthur Kantrowitz initially worried that laser enrichment might open
the door to nuclear proliferation. At rst glimpse it seems like its a garage operation. A garage
operation for separating uranium isotopes is a frightening thing, he recalled in a 1985 interview.
He imposed special security restrictions but eventually realized this is not an easy way to make a
bomb. It might be an easy way to make 1000 bombs, but it is not a terrorist operation because
of its technical complexity [2].
In 1972 the AEC launched competing laser uranium enrichment projects at its Los Alamos
and Livermore laboratories.
John Emmett, director of Livermores laser program, chose to try selective excitation of
U-235 atoms in uranium vapor with the relatively well-developed tunable dye laser. That
paralleled the Avco approach but was based on earlier work by Ray Kidder of Livermore. They
proposed a two-step process, starting with using visible output of a narrow-band dye laser tuned
to excite U-235, then ionizing the excited uranium atoms. In early 1973 Livermore hired three
developers of the rst continuous-wave dye laser from Eastman Kodak, Ben Snavely, Otis
Peterson, and Sam Tuccio, to start and manage the program. It seemed like an exciting thing to
do at the time, Snavely recalled many years later, an opinion echoed by the other two.
At Los Alamos, Reed Jensen and John Lyman chose to try selective enrichment in UF6, the
compound used in gaseous diffusion, which sublimes at about 55 deg Celsius and is easier to
handle than uranium vapor. They found a large isotope shift in a 16-m absorption band of UF6
and discovered that ultraviolet photons could photodissociatiate excited UF6 molecules, precipitating solid UF5 from the gas phase reaction and releasing free uorine into the gas. Developing
161
Fig. 1.
The Avco-Everett scheme for laser enrichment of

uranium required the combination of four laser beams to produce
the desired wavelengths to select U-235. (AVCO Research
Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Physics
Today Collection.)
Fig. 2.
Four milligrams of uranium with its U-235

concentration enriched to 3% by a dye laser process at Livermore
is visible at the bottom of this test tubethe rst time this much
uranium was enriched by lasers. 1975 photo from the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. (Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.)
162
the process would require nding a narrowband 16-m laser that could generate
enough power to dissociate 235UF6. Los
Alamos chose C. Paul Robinson to be the
director of the program to solve all those
problems.
At Livermore, Snavely clashed with
Edward Teller and particularly recalled
Tellers disapproval of a metal-vapor process that eventually was adopted for the
Atomic-Vapor Laser Isotope Separation
(AVLIS) program (see Fig. 3). When
Snavely told him he expected the process
to succeed by the end of September, Teller
grumbled, You mean by the 31st of September? Snavely ignored him, and Teller
pointedly said, You know September has
only 30 days. Snavely then replied, Yes,
I knew that, but I wasnt sure that everybody knew it, and Teller threw him out of
his ofce. Yet Snavely recalled that after he
succeeded, Teller made a point of congratulating him when they met at a University
of California ceremony.
Livermore was the rst to report uranium enrichment in June 1974 at the International Quantum Electronics Conference in San Francisco. They illuminated a
beam of hot uranium vapor with a dye
laser emitting near 590 nm, selectively
exciting U-235 atoms that then were ionized with ultraviolet light from a mercury
arc lamp [3]. Figure 2 shows the enriched
uranium oxidized to form yellowcake
visible in the bottom of a test tube. That
process would not scale to mass production, but Richard W. Solarz and Jeffery A.
Paisner later found a way to coherently
pump the selected isotope all the way from
the ground state to an autoionization state
(Rydberg level), permitting cost-effective
isotope separation.
Meanwhile, Los Alamos developed a
two-step process in which a 16-m source
rst excited vibration of cooled UF6 molecules containing U-235 and then a 308-nm
xenon-chloride laser removed a uorine
atom from the excited UF6. The resulting
UF5 precipitated as a solid that could be
ltered from the gas. Developing the cooling process was a major accomplishment;
it required owing UF6 diluted with a
noble gas through a supersonic nozzle to
cool it while keeping it in the gas state to

maintain a narrow line spectrum, and
pulsing the gas ow in synchronization
with the laser pulses.
Los Alamos rst demonstrated enrichment in 1976, but the details were kept
classied until 1978, when the news was
released to Laser Focus in a remarkably
roundabout way. A reporter rst visited
the lab, but researchers who showed him
around the lab told him nothing about
uranium enrichment results. A few days
after his visit, a university researcher
phoned the author to suggest that he call
Los Alamos and ask, Have you enriched
macroscopic quantities of uranium? The
author did, and it was as if he had said
Fig. 3. Benjamin Snavely (right) and Sam Tuccio examine
the laser system used to enrich U-235 concentration in hot
open sesame. Los Alamos ofcials were
uranium vapor at Livermore. (Lawrence Livermore National
delighted to answer yes and provide
Laboratory.)
details on their two-step process [4]. Evidently security had authorized the disclosure only in response to those exact words.
By the late 1970s, uranium enrichment was a major research program. The
two competing government programs consumed a total of about a hundred million
dollars a year. Jersey Nuclear-Avco Isotopes continued its atomic uranium enrichment research, spending a total of over $70
million before shutting it down in 1981
after the government refused to fund a
demonstration plant [5].
The laser community tended to see
selective laser excitation as the big challenge and focused its attention on the
lasers. Livermore had the more straightforward problem, and built a bank of
high-power copper-vapor lasers to pump
Fig. 4. Copper-vapor pumped dye lasers scaled for uranium
large dye lasers for its AVLIS program. By
enrichment at Livermore. Most of the green light from the copper
1982, Livermore had a master oscillator/
lasers was tightly conned so it could efciently pump dye lasers,
power amplier (MOPA) array of copperwhich emitted red-orange light tuned to three absorption lines of
U-235 vapor. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)
vapor lasers emitting 7 kW, pumping a
dye-laser MOPA array emitting 2.5 kW
day in and day out (see Fig. 4). Los Alamos needed to develop a 16-m source, which it achieved by
Raman-shifting the output of carbon-dioxide lasers. Although details of that technology were kept
under security wraps, Los Alamos was able to generate the required power and linewidth with efciency
considered reasonable at the time. The heart of that system was a hydrogen-uoride optical parametric
oscillator, developed by George Arnold and Robert Wenzel. That oscillator was originally used to
perfect the spectroscopic data and was subsequently used as the seed source for the Raman-shifted
carbon-dioxide laser amplier.
Little mentioned at the time was a parallel, classied program aimed at purifying plutonium for use
in nuclear weapons. Fissionable plutonium-239 is produced by irradiating U-238 with neutrons in a
special reactor. However, some U-238 atoms absorb a second neutron, producing Pu-240, which
163
ssions spontaneously so only low levels can be tolerated in nuclear weapons. The special isotope
separation program launched in 1975 was intended to produce essentially pure plutonium-239. It
remained small for a few years, reaching only about $5 million in 1980, but funding jumped in 1981,
and the Reagan Administration boosted the budget to $76 million in 1983 in a plan to assemble more
than 14,000 additional nuclear warheads in the next decade. Livermore and Los Alamos each had their
own plutonium projects, based on adapting their preferred processes for use with plutonium.
Although public statements stressed progress in selective laser excitation of U-235, both labs faced
problems in producing a nal product. The fundamental problem with both programs was that
chemical and physical reactions after the successful laser-induced chemistry or ionization quickly
scrambled the isotopes, making it difcult to collect the initially enriched U-235 or isotopically puried
plutonium. In the Molecular Laser Isotope Separation (MLIS) program, the pentauoride molecule
could easily steal a uorine atom from another hexauoride molecule before it condensed on the
collector. In the AVLIS case, the laser-generated ion could steal an electron during the plasma extraction
process and be lost from the enriched stream.
Those problems did not deter the Department of Energys (DOEs) support for laser enrichment,
and in 1982, DOE picked the Livermore atomic-vapor approach for uranium and shuttered the
molecular separation program at Los Alamos. As would be expected in such decisions, both scientic
and political considerations affected the nal outcome.
However, a slowdown in nuclear power development after the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor
accident reduced concerns about supplies of enriched uranium. As fears of oil shortages eased, new
technology for producing reactor fuel became a lower priority. DOE delayed its decision to build a pilot
AVLIS uranium plant at Livermore until 1985. The main rationale was economic: DOE calculated that
AVLIS could produce separative work units (SWUs), a measure of uranium enrichment, for as little as
$25, compared to $70 to $80 for gaseous diffusion. The plan called for phasing out gaseous diffusion
except for highly enriched uranium, which the Livermore approach was not congured to produce.
Livermore began operating a pilot-sized laser and separator system in 1986 and spent several years
rening the technology before they were able to operate full-sized equipment for tens of hours (see
Fig. 5). They demonstrated plutonium enrichment rst in the early 1990s, with
uranium enrichment and scaling to larger
scales to follow.
By this point two external developments affected the need for laser isotope
enrichment. The end of the Cold War
stopped the build-up of the U.S. nuclear
arsenal and eliminated the pressure to purify plutonium for new nuclear warheads.
It also made surplus highly enriched uranium from the Russian arsenal available
for down-blending into reactor fuel at
prices well below freshly enriched
uranium.
The 1992 transfer of DOEs enrichment program to the United States Enrichment Corporation put Livermores program on standby until July 1994. Livermore
completed its uranium-enrichment pilot
plant in the fall of 1997, and it processed
several thousand kilograms in a series of
runs involving 24-hour operation of copper-vapor pumped dye lasers spread over
Fig. 5. One of three units for separation of U-235 in
1.5 years. During that time, they also demLivermores pilot plant for laser isotope separation. (Lawrence
onstrated doubled-neodymium pumping of
Livermore National Laboratory.)
164
the dye lasers for future pumping in a production facility. But U.S. Enrichment halted those tests in
June 1999, citing low prices for enriched uranium and high internal expenses for other work [6]. Those
cuts also stopped plutonium enrichment. The motivation for continuing the laser program also was hurt
by the continuing successes of the centrifuge programs that had been ongoing worldwide. All told,
Livermores quarter century of laser isotope separation development had cost more than $2 billion.
By then, molecular laser isotope enrichment had been revived by two Australians, Michael
Goldsworthy and Horst Struve, who in 1990 began developing a process they called SILEX for
Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation. Like the Los Alamos process, SILEX is based on cooling
UF6 so resonances for molecules containing U-235 and U-238 are clearly separated and the molecules
are concentrated in the ground state. Excitation with a 16-m laser source selectively excites molecules
containing U-235, producing a product stream enriched in U-235 and a tails stream depleted in
U-235 but richer in U-238. Details are classied, but the main differences from the old Los Alamos
process are thought to be in extraction of the laser-excited U-235 fraction of the material. In the
information about this process there has been no hint of the laser-induced chemistry or ionization that
initiated the isotope scrambling that plagued the earlier programs.
U.S. Enrichment supported Goldworthy and Struves work from 1996 to 2002, and after that
funding stopped, they formed a public company called Silex Systems Ltd. in Australia. Silex eventually
licensed a joint venture of General Electric and Hitachi called GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to use the
process. After a few years of study, GE Hitachi Nuclear applied for a license to build a pilot plant in
North Carolina, which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved in 2012. The plan is controversial, and the nal outcome remains to be seen, but after a near-death experience, laser uranium
enrichment is clinging tenuously to life.
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Otis Peterson for assisting with this essay.
References
1. R. H. Levy and G. S. Janes, Method of and apparatus for the separation of isotopes, U.S. patent
3, 772, 519 (13 November 1973).
2. Arthur Kantrowitz, interview by Robert W. Seidel for the Laser History Project, 25 September 1985.
3. Anonymous, Report from San Francisco, Laser Focus 10(8), 1025 (1974).
4. Anonymous, Molecular process enriched milligrams of uranium two years ago at Los Alamos, Laser
Focus 14(5), 3234 (May 1978).
5. George Palmer and D. I. Bolef, Laser isotope separation: the plutonium connection, Bull. Atom. Sci.
40(3), 2631 (March 1984).
6. A. Heller, Laser technology follows in Lawrences footsteps, Sci. Technol. Rev., 1321 (May 2000),
https://www.llnl.gov/str/Hargrove.html.
165
19601974

John Murray
aser fusion research began [1] at several establishments shortly after the rst laser
operated in 1960. John Nuckolls of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoroy and
others around the world quickly recognized that the laser had the potential to concentrate
power to the extreme levels required for small-scale fusion tests. Theoretical analysis showed
[1,2] that achieving fusion and signicant energy yield with the easiest targets to ignite, a mixture
of deuterium and tritium (DT), would require imploding them to extremely high density
perhaps ten thousand times normal liquid densitywith nanosecond-scale pulses in the kilojoule
to megajoule range. Producing the extreme pressure and fuel implosion velocity required to reach
the required density would require irradiance of 1014 W/cm2 with lasers expected to be available
in the near term. The challenge was to achieve signicant energy yield at a size that looked
reasonable for laboratory experiments.
Two basic concepts for laser-driven fusion explosions were quickly developed, as shown in
Fig. 1. The direct-drive implosion uses laser energy that impinges directly on a spherical target
containing DT fuel within an ablator shell that absorbs laser energy and expands, compressing
the remaining ablator and fuel to a small volume in the center of the target and heating it to
initiate DT fusion. The indirect-drive implosion absorbs the laser energy on the inside of a heavy
metal cavity or hohlraum, producing soft x-rays that illuminate the ablator and implode the fuel
capsule as in the direct-drive fusion.
The direct-drive implosion requires extremely uniform irradiance to achieve spherical
symmetry. Indirect-drive fusion eases that requirement by converting the laser light to soft
x-rays that with proper design uniformly irradiate the central capsule. X-ray absorption in the
ablator is also simpler and less subject to nonlinear processes than laser absorption. However,
indirect drive couples only 10%20% of the drive energy to the fuel capsule, so it needs a higher
laser drive energy.
Laser sources for such small targets should store energy from a long pump pulse and deliver
a carefully shaped nanosecond pulse. Development of the Q-switch and the neodymium-glass
laser were important milestones, providing a nanosecond pulse source and an amplier that
could be made in large sizes and had rather low gain so that it did not break into spontaneous
oscillation from stray light before the nanosecond extraction pulse. Those developments
encouraged Ray Kidder of Livermore to estimate that a pulse of at least 100 kJ lasting less
than 10 ns might be able to ignite a small amount of DT fuel [1].
The glass laser is not a perfect solution, however, and in the early years of inertial fusion
many other options were explored. The photolytically pumped iodine laser at 1.3 m was
identied as a promising fusion driver as soon as it was demonstrated in the early 1960s. The
gas medium makes the laser less limited by nonlinear processes and much less expensive than a
solid. The Asterix laser system [3] at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching,
Germany, and the Iskra laser system [4] at the Research Institute of Experimental Physics in
Sarov, Russia (formerly Arzamas-16), were used in fusion research. Asterix, now operating in
Prague, Czech Republic [5], produces up to 1 kJ in 350 ps, with frequency conversion to 657
and 438 nm. Iskra-5 reached 120 TW in 12 beams in 1991. Pumping a photolytic iodine laser
with explosive-driven light sources, looked very appealing as a low-cost (but single-shot) route
to megajoule energies [6], but precision control proved too difcult for use in fusion
experiments.
166
Fig. 1.
In a direct-drive target, laser beams illuminate a fuel capsule uniformly. In an indirect-drive target, they
illuminate the inside of a heavy metal hohlraum surrounding the target and are converted to soft x-rays. The x-rays then
implode the fuel capsule.
The 10.6-m carbon dioxide laser initially seemed an excellent candidate, with high efciency, the
potential for large ampliers in large sizes, and relatively inexpensive construction. The Antares project
(see Fig. 2) [7] at the Los Alamos National Laboratory directed nanosecond CO2 pulses of up 40 kJ on a
fusion target from two nal ampliers, each with 12 roughly square 30-cm subapertures. Unfortunately, the long wavelength of the CO2 laser proved a severe handicap because laser-plasma instabilities
scale with the square of the wavelength, so they are two orders of magnitude larger at 10.6 m than at
1.06 m; therefore CO2 laser fusion was abandoned in 1985.
The 248-nm krypton uoride laser has also been explored as a fusion driver. The short wavelength
is desirable for target interaction, but optics that far in the ultraviolet are difcult to develop. The KrF
laser has broad bandwidth, which is desirable for beam smoothing in direct-drive fusion. At the power
levels needed for fusion, it generates pulses of 100 ns or longer, which must be optically compressed to
the few nanosecond pulses required for fusion. The Nike laser system [8] at the Naval Research
Laboratory has explored KrF technology by stacking 56 pulses through an amplier to give up to 4 kJ
on target in 4 ns, and the Ashura laser system [9] at the Electrotechnical Laboratories, Tsukuba, Japan,
has operated with up to 2.7 kJ in 20-ns target pulses. Figure 3 shows the 6060-cm nal amplier of the
Nike system.
The neodymium glass laser emerged as the most versatile and successful laser system for fusion
research. A major advantage was that its 1.06-m pulses can be converted efciently to the second and
third harmonics at 532 and 355 nm, which proved less vulnerable to laser-plasma instabilities than
longer wavelengths. Xenon ashlamps excite neodymium ions in the glass, which drop to the upper
level of the 1.06-m laser transition. The transition has a lifetime of 300400 ms and a gain crosssection high enough that energy can be extracted efciently in short pulses with uences tolerable for
laser optics.
Early glass laser systems used cylindrical rods similar in concept to the rst laser, a small
cylindrical rod of ashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal. The Deln laser system [10] at the
Lebedev Institute, Moscow, Russia, used a large array of cylindrical rods serving as subapertures
167
Fig. 2. Final amplier of the

Antares CO2 laser system.
(Courtesy of Los Alamos
National Laboratory.)
within a single beamline. Ampliers that used zig-zag laser beam propagation through large laser
glass slabs were also explored [11].
Fusion experiments in the U.S. began in the early 1970s, with three laboratories building a series of
neodymium-glass lasers initially operated at 1.06 m.
Moshe Lubin established the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester in
1970 and built the four-beam Delta laser in 1972. When the labs new building was completed in 1978,
the six-beam Zeta laser began operation, performing experiments for universities, government agencies,
and industry.
The promise of laser fusion also attracted a private company, KMS Fusion, founded by physicist
and entrepeneur Keeve M. Siegel in Ann Arbor, Michigan. KMS built its own glass laser, and had some
early experimental success, but the company ran short of money. Siegel suffered a fatal stroke while
asking Congress for government support in 1975, and KMS Fusion survived for a time on government
contracts.
John Emmett and Carl Haussmann led development of a series of glass lasers for fusion
experiments at Livermore. The one-beam, 10-J Janus laser conducted the rst fusion shots in 1974.
The one-beam Cyclops laser followed, a prototype of one beam in the 20-beam Shiva laser. The twobeam Argus laser came on line in 1976, followed in 1977 by Shiva, which reached 10 kJ.
The most popular design for modern neodymium glass lasers with apertures larger than 10-cm is
the Brewsters-angle slab amplier shown in Fig. 4. A laser beam polarized in the plane of the gure
168
Fig. 3. The 60-cm aperture nal amplier of the Nike KrF laser. The amplier is pumped from two sides by electron
beams generated by the cylindrical pulse-forming lines. (Courtesy of Naval Research Laboratory.)
sees no loss when it strikes the slab surfaces at Brewsters angle, and the slab faces are also easily
accessible for ashlamp pumping. Early examples [12] used circular disks of glass, forcing elliptical
beam proles. More modern designs use elliptical or rectangular slabs so that the laser beam can be
circular or square.
Many large glass fusion lasers have been built with those ampliers, such as Gekko [13] at Osaka
University, Japan; Vulcan [14] at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, UK; Omega [15] at
the University of Rochester; Phebus at the Commissariat a lEnergie Atomique, Limeil-Valenton,
France; and the sequence of lasers [16] leading to the Nova laser at Livermore completed in 1984. There
Fig. 4.
A Brewsters angle slab amplier using neodymium glass. The laser beam sees no loss if it propagates
through this series of slabs with polarization in the plane of the gure. (Courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.)
169
Fig. 5.
The NIF laser fusion facility. NIF has 192 laser beams of 40-cm aperture and a 10-m diameter target
chamber seen at the right end of the picture. (Courtesy of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)
have been many others [17]. Nova was the largest of its generation, with ten 46-cm beamlines able
deliver up to 30 kJ at 351 nm in shaped pulses of a few nanoseconds duration for indirect-drive
experiments.
The Omega Upgrade laser at Rochester [15] began experiments in 1995. It delivers 30 kJ in 20-cm
diameter beams at 351 nm in a 64-beam geometry optimized for direct-drive targets. The beams use a
technique [18] called smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD) to smooth the irradiance to give a very
uniform prole on the target.
The largest fusion laser system now operating [19] is the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Figure 5 is an artists sketch of the facility. It contains 192
laser beamlines of 40-cm square aperture and was designed to irradiate targets with pulses to 1.8 MJ at
the third harmonic (351 nm), and to have very exible output pulses for a wide variety of target
experiments [20].
NIF irradiates indirect-drive targets with conical arrays of beams that illuminate three rings of 64
beam spots each on the inside of a cylindrical hohlraum. This allows experimenters to tune the x-ray
distribution within the hohlraum to optimize target implosions. The NIF beam arrangement can also be
used to drive some direct-drive targets [2123]. SSD smoothing is available if required.
Each beamline includes sixteen slabs, with the beam making four passes through the nal amplier
(see Fig. 6) before exiting and being diretected into the target chamber. Such multipass ampliers reduce
the number of intermediate ampliers and reduce cost of the facility, though they are harder to design
and control than the single-pass amplier chains used for most fusion laser systems in the past. Each
preamplier module in NIF injects about 1 J into each of four adjacent beamlines. The oscillator that
drives the preampliers is a ber laser that uses modulators and other hardware derived from those
developed for ber-optic communications systems.
The Laser Megajoule (LMJ) project under construction [23] by the Commissariat a lEnergie
Atomique at Le Barp near Bordeaux, France, will have amplers similar to NIF, but will have 240
170
Fig. 6.
A stack of four NIF slabs ready for insertion into the nal amplier. (Courtesy of Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.)
beamlines with 18 slabs each, and somewhat higher energy output capability. An eight-beam prototype
called Ligne dIntgration Laser (LIL) is currently operating.
Omega Upgrade, NIF, and LMJ also will have the capability to deliver kilojoule-class, petawattpower picosecond beams to target from beamlines that use grating compression of frequency-chirped
pulses [24]. This capability allows them to explore an advanced target design [25] called the fast
ignition target that uses the main laser output to compress a target, and a separate petawatt
picosecond beam to heat the central spot of the target sufciently for ignition. Target implosion
simulations suggest that such targets will offer higher net gain (fusion energy out divided by laser energy
in) than conventional targets, highly desirable for future applications of laser fusion to energy
production. Other laser facilities also have experimental programs investigating fast ignition. Petawatt
beams are also useful for other experiments such as x-ray backlighting of imploding targets.
The National Ignition Facility succeeded in delivering pulses of more than 1.8 mJ to targets in
2012. However, that design energy proved insufcient to ignite fusion targets. Further experiments
have increased yield, and Livermore researchers are focusing on improving target compression and
reconciling theory with experimental results.
Researchers have long hoped to use laser fusion for electric power generation. The HiPER project
[26] in the European Community, FIREX [27] in Japan, and LIFE [28,29] in the U.S. are all exploring
energy applications of advanced laser fusion concepts. These projects are developing concepts for
high-average-power facilities to follow NIF and LMJ, either with advances from NIF/LMJ-like
technologies or with advanced diode-pumped solid-state lasers that offer higher efciency and better
thermal properties. Large slabs of laser-grade transparent ceramics [30,31], if developed in time, would
be very valuable for advanced laser fusion projects since they offer the laser and thermal properties of
171
laser crystals without the difculty of growing large crystals. There are numerous other studies of
conceptual designs for laser fusion power plants using solid-state [32] or KrF [33,34] lasers.
Fifty years after its origins, fusion research with lasers is a vibrant research area that has sparked
many developments in both fusion and laser technology, and continues to do so.
References
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2. J. D. Lindl, Inertial Connement Fusion (Springer, 1998). Most of the technical content can also be
found in the review article by the same author: J. D. Lindl, Development of the indirect-drive approach
to inertial connement fusion and the target physics basis for ignition and gain, Phys. Plasmas 2, 3933
4024 (1995). See also http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/10126383-6NAuBK/native/10126383.
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3. H. Baumhacker, G. Brederlow, E. Fill, R. Volk, S. Witkowski, and K. J. Witte, Layout and performance
of the Asterix IV iodine laser at MPQ, Garching, Appl. Phys. B 61, 225232 (1995).
4. V. I. Annenkov, V. A. Bagretsov, V. G. Bezuglov, L. M. Vinogradski, V. A. Gadash, I. V. Galakhov,
A. S. Gasheev, I. P. Guzov, V. I. Zadorozhnyi, V. A. Eroshenko, A. Yu. Ilin, V. A. Kargin, G. A. Kirillov,
G. G. Kochemasov, V. A. Krotov, Yu. P. Kuzmichev, S. G. Lapin, L. V. L'vov, M. R. Mochalov, V. M.
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N. M. Khudikov, V. A. Khrustalev, V. S. Chebotar, N. A. Cherkesov, and V. I. Shemyakin, Iskra-5 pulsed
laser with an output power of 120 TW, Sov. J. Quantum Electron. 21, 487 (1991). See also G. A. Kirillov,
V. M. Murugov, V. T. Punin, and V. I. Shemyakin, High power laser system ISKRA V, Laser Part.
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5. http://www.pals.cas.cz/laboratory/.
6. V. P. Arzhanov, B. L. Borovich, V. S. Zuev, V. M. Kazanski, V. A. Katulin, G. A. Kirillov, S. B. Kormer,
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7. J. Jansen, Review and status of Antares, IEEE Pulsed Power Conference (IEEE, 1979), http://www.
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11. M. E. Brodov, V. P. Degtyarova, A. V. Ivanov, P. I. Ivashkin, V. V. Korobkin, P. P. Pashinin, A. M.
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172
14. I. N. Ross, M. S. White, J. E. Boon, D. Craddock, A. R. Damerell, R. J. Day, A. F. Gibson, P. Gottfeldt,

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15. http://www.lle.rochester.edu/omega_facility/.
16. The development of these lasers through steps such as Janus, Cyclops, Argus, Shiva, Novette, and,
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science_technology/pdfs/Lasers_1972_1997.pdf and https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/interactive/
book1/index.htm.
17. Wikipedia has a list of major current and former laser fusion facilities at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_fusion_experiments#Laser-driven. Also see http://laserstars.org/biglasers/pulsed/index.html.
18. S. Skupsky, R. W. Short, R. S. Craxton, S. Letzring, and J. M. Soures, Improved laser beam
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19. See the introductory review G. H. Miller, E. I. Moses, and C. R. Wuest, The National Ignition
Facility,Opt. Eng. 43, 28412853 (2004), and the papers in the special section following the
review. See also E. I. Moses, R. N. Boyd, B. A. Remington, C. J. Keane, and R. Al-Ayat, The
National Ignition Facility: ushering in a new age for high energy density science, Phys. Plasmas
16, 041006 (2009).
20. C. A. Haynam, P. J. Wegner, J. M. Auerbach, M. W. Bowers, S. N. Dixit, G. V. Erbert, G. M.
Heestand, M. A. Henesian, M. R. Hermann, K. S. Jancaitis, K. R. Manes, C. D. Marshall, N. C.
Mehta, J. Menapace, E. Moses, J. R. Murray, M. C. Nostrand, C. D. Orth, R. Patterson, R. A.
Sacks, M. J. Shaw, M. Spaeth, S. B. Sutton, W. H. Williams, C. C. Widmayer, R. K. White, S. T.
Yang, and B. M. Van Wonterghem, National Ignition Facility laser performance status, Appl.
Opt. 46, 32763303 (2007). See also G. M. Heestand, C. A. Haynam, P. J. Wegner, M. W. Bowers,
S. N. Dixit, G. V. Erbert, M. A. Henesian, M. R. Hermann, K. S. Jancaitis, K. Knittel, T. Kohut, J.
D. Lindl, K. R. Manes, C. D. Marshall, N. C. Mehta, J. Menapace, E. Moses, J. R. Murray, M. C.
Nostrand, C. D. Orth, R. Patterson, R. A. Sacks, R. Saunders, M. J. Shaw, M. Spaeth, S. B. Sutton,
W. H. Williams, C. C. Widmayer, R. K. White, S. T. Yang, and B. M. Van Wonterghem,
Demonstration of high-energy 2 (526.5 nm) operation on the National Ignition Facility, Appl.
Opt. 47, 34943499 (2008).
21. S. Skupsky, J. A. Marozas, R. S. Craxton, R. Betti, T. J. B. Collins, J. A. Delettrez, V. N. Goncharov,
P. W. McKenty, P. B. Radha, T. R. Boehly, J. P. Knauer, F. J. Marshall, D. R. Harding, J. D. Kilkenny,
D. D. Meyerhofer, T. C. Sangster, and R. L. McCrory, Polar direct drive on the National Ignition
Facility, Phys. Plasmas 11, 27632771 (2004).
22. NIF target experiment at 0.7 MJ: S. H. Glenzer, B. J. MacGowan, P. Michel, N. B. Meezan, L. J. Suter,
and S. N. Dixit, Symmetric inertial connement fusion implosions at ultra-high laser energies, Science
5(3), 12281231 (2010).
23. Laser Megajoule (LMJ)Ligne dIntgration Laser (LIL): http://www.lmj.cea.fr/index.htm.
24. As an example for LMJ, see http://petal.aquitaine.fr/spip.php?lang=en. Picosecond capabilities are also
discussed at the Omega and NIF websites.
25. M. H. Key, Status of, and prospects for the fast ignition inertial fusion concept, Phys. Plasmas
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H. Fujita, H. Habara, T. Hall, Y. Izawa, T. Jitsuno, Y. Kitagawa, K. M. Krushelnick, K. L. Lancaster,
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174
19601974
History of Laser Remote Sensing,

Laser Radar, and Lidar
Dennis K. Killinger
idar and remote sensing grew from developments in optical spectroscopy, optical
instrumentation, and electronics in the 1930s to 1950s. Starting in 1930, searchlights
were directed upward and atmospheric scattering was measured with a separately located
telescope. Starting in 1938, pulsed electric sparks and ashlamps were used in searchlights to
measure cloud base heights. Middleton and Spilhaus introduced the term LIDAR (for Light
Detection and Ranging) in 1953.
The laser revolutionized lidar and launched laser remote sensing. In 1962 Louis Smullen of
MIT and visiting scientist Giorgio Fiocco (who had worked on radar at Marconi) detected
backreection from the Moon using 50-J, 0.5-ms pulses from a Raytheon ruby laser transmitted
through a 12-inch telescope together with a 48-inch receiving telescope and a liquid-nitrogen
cooled photomultiplier at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. (See Fig. 1.) The signal that returned after
2.5 s was very weak, including only about 12 photons, and had to be recorded by photographing
a double-beam oscilloscope trace using vast amounts of Polaroid lm and time. The project
was called Luna-See, probably reecting its difculty. The following year a newly invented
rotating mirror Q-switch shortened a 0.5-J ruby pulse to 50 ns for a series of lidar studies of the
upper atmosphere. The rst use of the term lidar referring to such a laser radar system was used
by Goyer and Watson in 1963 and by Ligda in 1964.
During the next decade advances in laser technology drove improvements in laser remote
sensing. Richard Schotland in 1964 detected the concentration of a gas in the atmosphere for the
rst time by temperature-tuning the wavelength of a ruby laser across a water vapor absorption
line. This was the rst Differential-Absorption Lidar (DIAL) system.
Other groups went on to detect other species. After a detailed theoretical analysis of lidar
techniques by Byer and Kildal in 1971, Hinkley and Kelley showed experimental detection of air
pollutants using tunable diode lasers in 1971, and Byer and Garbuny detailed DIAL requirements
for pollution detection in 1973. Karl Rothe and Herbert Walthers group in Germany used DIAL
with tunable dye lasers to detect NO2 and in 19741976 Ed Murray, Bill Grant, and colleagues at
SRI detected the gas with a tunable CO2 laser. Menzies and Hinkley in 1978 measured
atmospheric gases with a laser absorption spectrometer (LAS), two waveguide CO2 lasers, and
stripchart recorders mounted in a plane (see Fig. 2). In 1979, they measured atmospheric gases
with the balloon-borne Laser Heterodyne Radiometer shown in Fig. 3. Sune Svanbergs group at
the Lund Institute mapped the mercury emission from coal-red power plants in a seminal DIAL
study in the 1980s, Jack Bufton at NASA Goddard measured atmospheric CO2 in 1983, Ed
Browell at NASA Langley measured water vapor and ozone in the atmosphere and the ow of
Sahara Desert dust from Africa to the Southeast United States, and Nobuo Sugimoto and
Kazuhiro Asais group measured similar Asian dust ow.
DIAL also performed landmark environmental observations. In 1993, Bill Heaps group at
NASA Goddard and Stuart McDermids group at JPL tracked variations of stratospheric ozone
levels in time and space for the rst time, validating data suggesting an ozone hole collected
by solar occultation instruments on NASA satellites in the 1980s. The satellite sensors had
detected the hole years earlier but had not transmitted the data to the ground because the
software considered the measured ozone levels too low to be accurate. The problem was
175
Fig. 1. Photo of Luna-See, the rst laser radar measurement of a laser beam backscattered from the Moon
(white speck at the upper left) in May 1962 at Lincoln Laboratory by MIT Prof. Louise Smullen (left), Raytheon
laser scientist Dr. Stanley Kass (middle), and visiting radar scientist Dr. Giorgio Fiocco (right). (Courtesy MIT
Museum.)
Fig. 2.
Photo of 1978 JPL laser absorption spectrometer

(LAS) lidar system mounted in a Beechcraft Queen Air aircraft.
(Courtesy of R. Menzies, JPL.)
176
corrected by programing the satellite to

transmit raw data for observations on and
off the absorption line instead of just the
ratio of the two.
The advent of tunable quantum cascade lasers, tunable optical parametric
oscillators, and tunable solid-state and
semiconductor lasers now have made
DIAL measurements of atmospheric gases
almost routine. DIAL instruments regularly monitor methane and CO2 emissions to
the atmosphere and measure ammonia
and other gases for industrial process control. Thats a big advance from the 1960s,
when ozone and smog levels in Los
Angeles were monitored by timing the
deterioration of a rubber band placed outside a window and stretched by a small
weight.
John Reagans group at the University
of Arizona began lidar mapping of atmospheric aerosols in the late 1960s, and
others built on their effort. Pat McCormick
and David Winker of NASA Langley ew
one of the rst lidars in space, the Laser In

space Technology Experiment (LITE) in
1994 on Space Shuttle mission STS-64,
which mapped cloud-top heights and
range-resolved distributions on a global
scale. Lidar also proved valuable in observing particulates injected into the
stratosphere by volcanic eruptions, which
take about six months to mix with the
atmosphere and remain airborne for about
ve years.
Hard-target lidar trackers and range
nders were developed especially for military applications, with signicant progress
made by Al Jelalians group at Raytheon,
and Ingmar Renhorn and Ove Steinvall at
the Sweden NDRI. Al Gschwendtners
group at MIT Lincoln Lab developed a
high-speed imaging heterodyne Doppler
lidar that could take full-view Doppler
range-resolved images at a 30-Hz frame
Fig. 3. Photo of Bob Menzies and JPL laser heterodyne
rate. Those heterodyne systems led to
radiometer balloon instrument sitting in its gondola frame in 1979.
lidars with much higher pulse rates for
(Courtesy of R. Menzies, JPL.)
scanning and mapping hard targets and
terrain. Alan Carswell of the University of
Toronto founded the Optech Corp., which developed suitcase-sized imaging lidar scanners that re
200,000 pulses per second. Linked to a precision GPS network, these systems have compiled detailed
3D maps of urban buildings and discovered and mapped Mayan ruins hidden under jungle canopies
using a foliage-penetrating lidar. Such precision mapping lidars have been so successful that they now
perform most detailed geographical coordinate measurements. Another sign of their importance is that
NIST has established a standards group for lidar mapping.
Laser-induced uorescence (LIF) also can detect important species in the atmosphere. Doug Davis
and Bill Heaps at Georgia Tech, Charlie Wangs group at the Ford Scientic Research Center, and the
author in 1975 were the rst to detect the OH free radical under ambient conditions at a concentration
of 0.01 parts per trillion. OH is important as the major rate controller for chemical reactions that
deplete ozone in the upper atmosphere.
Large ashlamp-pumped dye lasers often were used to produce frequency-doubled pulses near
282.5 nm, and operating them could be interesting. The large dye lasers quickly photobleached the dye,
so 55-gallon drums of pure ethanol were used to extend the lifetime of the circulating solvent. Federal
tax had to be paid on the pure drinking alcohol about $2000 a barrel which was returned after dye
was added and the liquid disposed of to show it had not been drunk. Recirculating the dyealcohol
solution stabilized uid temperature, but the coaxial ashlamps had limited lifetimes and would
explode after a few hundred hours. The Ford group had put the dyealcohol pump downside of the
ashlamp, so when the lamp exploded the pump just sucked in air. Unfortunately, Bell Labs had placed
the dyealcohol pump in front of the ashlamp, so it sprayed alcohol into the exploding ashlamp,
causing a major re. The arrangement was reversed in later laser designs.
In 1980, Jim Anderson of Harvard conducted a series of high-altitude balloon-borne laser
measurements that conrmed the key roles of stratospheric OH and Freon in ozone depletion. Bill
Heaps group at NASA Goddard conducted similar measurements with a balloon-borne laser
spectrometer, but in one case the parachute failed to deploy upon descent, creating what Heaps called
the worlds rst Lidar Pancake.
LIF lidar also studied the tenuous sodium layer that surrounds the Earth at an elevation near 90
km. Early lidar studies in 1972 by Gibson and Sandford, and in 1978 by Marie Chanins group in
177
France, measured sodium levels with a tunable yellow dye laser. They also observed gravity or
breathing waves of the upper atmosphere, dynamic waves that travel around the world. Separate
studies by L. Thomas group in 1979, Chet Gardners group at the University of Illinois in 1990, and
C. Y. Shes group in 1992 at Colorado State University showed that LIF excitation of the sodium layer
could provide a beacon or guide star for adaptive optics compensation of atmospheric turbulence in
ground telescopes. Most large ground-based telescopes now use laser-produced guide stars together
with compensating optics to remove turbulence effects in milliseconds.
Lidar observations of the small Doppler shift in backscattered light arising from target velocity are
challenging but can yield valuable results. In 1970, Milt Huffaker used a laser-Doppler system to detect
aircraft trailing vortices. In the early 1980s, Freeman Hall and Mike Hardestys group at NOAA and
Christian Werners group at DFVLR/Germany developed a coherent CO2 laser system that mapped
range-resolved wind-speed proles near airports and within boundary ow geometries. Later, Sammy
Henderson and Huffakers group at Coherent Technologies Inc. developed coherent lidars based
on solid-state laser systems near 2 m. Direct-detection lidars developed during the past decade can
also measure Doppler-shifted returns in ways that complement the coherent measurements. Now berlaser-based coherent Doppler lidars are mapping wind elds around wind turbines to increase efciency
of the blade pitch and direction.
Laser-induced-breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) has also shown promise in the past decade for
detecting chemicals at ranges from less than a meter out to a few hundred meters. Focusing a 0.1-J, 5-ns
pulse through a telescope can produce dielectric breakdown in the air, yielding identiable lines of
atomic and ionized species in the plasma. It is a long way from the 3500-J, 1-s CO2 pulses Vladimir
Zuev of the Tomsk Laser Institute in Siberia used to produce a plasma spark 2 km from the laser
earning him a semi-serious prize at the 1986 International Laser Radar Conference in Toronto for
having made the worlds longest cigarette lighter.
Conferences and workshops have played a vital role in the development of lidar and laser remote
sensing. Much early and fundamental research was reported at Optical Society (OSA) Annual Meetings
and March American Physical Society meetings in the 1960s, and at early CLEA/CLEO/CLEOS
conferences in the 1970s. The International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment, rst held
in Ann Arbor in 1962, continues through today with an emphasis on passive satellite sensing.
One of the earliest conferences devoted to lidar was the 1968 Conference on Laser Radar Studies of
the Atmosphere in Boulder, Colorado, chaired by Vernon Derr. It continues today as the International
Laser Radar Conference (ILRC), run by the International Coordination Group on Laser Atmospheric
Studies (ICLAS). One of the rst conferences to look at the wide range of lidar techniques for species
detection was the Workshop on Optical and Laser Remote Sensing, sponsored by the Army Research
Ofce (ARO) in Monterey, California, in 1982 and chaired by Aram Mooradian and the author; Fig. 4
shows some attendees. An outgrowth of this was OSAs Topical Meeting on Optical Techniques for
Remote Probing of the Atmosphere, rst held in Incline Village/Lake Tahoe in 1983 and held
biannually for the next several decades, sometimes changing emphasis and name. The Coherent Laser
Radar Conference held rst in 1980 in Aspen, Colorado, by Milt Huffaker is still going strong today
with the most recent meetings in Barcelona, Spain, in 2013 and Boulder in 2015.
For the past ve decades, laser remote sensing and lidar has been an outstanding and rewarding
research career, often following the growth and expansion of the laser industry. It has seen the
development of many worldwide collaborations among lidar colleagues and friends. Figures 5 and 6
shows a lidar banquet dinner at the 1994 17th International Laser Radar Conference in Sendai,
Japan, with all participants obviously enjoying themselves.
Laser remote sensing has benetted from the development of new lasers and improvements in their
ease of use, compactness, cost, and reliability. Lidar systems in the 1970s occupied one or two optical
tables, had laser lifetimes of hours, and relied on computer data acquisition systems operating at
megahertz speeds. Over the past decade, lidar systems have started to use $10 tunable LEDs, 10 GHz
computers on a chip, and mini-spectrometersshrinking systems so that portable suitcase systems are
now routine.
Further reductions in size and cost are expected in the future. (Can we dream of tunable quantum
cascade lasers for $100?) Metamaterials and quantum-conned photonics will impact lasers and
178
Fig. 4.
Some attendees at the 1982 ARO Workshop on Optical and Laser Remote Sensing in Monterey,
Calif. L-R: Dennis Killinger, Charles C. Wang, Gil Davidson, Paul Kelley, Norman Menyuk, and Phil Russell.
Fig. 5.
Good lidar friends attending a banquet dinner at the 17th International Laser Radar Conference in
Sendai, Japan in 1994. (Left to right) bottom: Takao Kobayashi, Pat McCormick, Chet Gardner, Dennis Killinger,
Jack Bufton; top: Akio Nomura, Osamu Uchino, Hiromasa Ito, Yasuhiro Sasano, Kazuhiro Asai, Toshikazu Itabe.
179
Fig. 6. Humio Inaba, Rod Freulich, Jack Bufton, Kin Pui Chan, Mike Hardesty, and Dennis Killinger at 17th
ILRC in Sendai, Japan, 1994.
detection techniques such as femtosecond absorption spectroscopy. It is hard to predict the future, but it
is certain that major technical improvements will occur : : : they always have. As the technology
continues to improve and laser remote sensing and lidar techniques become more widely accepted,
we will nd uses for lidar in applications not yet imagined.
It is sobering to recall that 40 years ago we thought that the main use of lidar and laser remote
sensing was going to be akin to Star Trek where Spock scans the distant planet surface with a laser
beam and tells the Captain that there are two humanoids on the planets surface and one has a bad
kidney. Who would have guessed back then that one of the huge commercial successes for lidar today
would be mapping of urban buildings and geological features, nding buried Mayan ruins, mapping
wind elds for wind farms, detecting and mapping global climate change gases and pollutants in the
atmosphere, and laser sensing of pharmaceuticals and chemicals at close ranges.
180
PRE1940
19411959
19601974
19751990
1991PRESENT
19751990
Introduction
Michael Bass
n 1980, just 20 years after the rst laser was demonstrated and about 10 years after the way
to make low loss optical bers was discovered, two miracles took place: one that lots of
people noticed and that some recall and another that few noticed and that changed the course
of human history. At the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, the Miracle on Ice in
which the U.S.A. mens hockey team beat the much vaunted Soviet Union team was seen by tens
of millions on televisionlots of people noticed. However, the television broadcast of the
Olympic Games, including the hockey match, was transmitted over an optical communications
system using diode lasers and ber optics. Virtually no one noticed this miracle at the time, but
many billions would be affected by the technology. Optics changed the world and communications would never be the same. This section presents the pivotal events and technologies
leading to optical ber communications becoming practical.
Perhaps a few people in the mid-1970s could have foreseen that ultra-low-loss optical bers
and diode lasers would enable optics to take over the world as the dominant means of
communications. Optics did just that. Not only are billions of kilometers of ber optics
communication cables in use with diode lasers as the light sources but progress continues as the
demand for more and more information-carrying capacity continues to grow. New techniques
for multiplexing are still being developed to enable higher throughput.
The invention of the laser and the demonstration of nonlinear optics spurred a greatly
renewed interest in optics. In the period 19751990 that interest blossomed into many major
applications and scientic breakthroughs. Nonlinear optics beneted from demonstration of
excellent new materials for use in both the visible and the infrared. Periodically poled nonlinear
material had been described as early as 1962 but was nally demonstrated in this period. It
turned out that the periodically poled material was often a more efcient harmonic generator
than its single-crystal index-matched version. These materials and greatly improved engineering
made optical parametric oscillators and ampliers available for applications requiring wavelength tunable sources. Nonlinear optics also made possible achieving ultrashort pulses,
6 picosec in this period (today 67 attosec) and supercontinuum pulses with spectral content
exceeding an octave in frequency.
The list of applications of optics that developed in this period is too long to list in its
entirety here. However, a few are worth mentioning because they are so common that the
outstanding optics and optical design that makes them possible can be easily overlooked. They
are the bar code scanner, the CD/DVD player, the laser printer, the laser pointer, the laser cut,
the drilled or welded part of a nished product, the laser-marked product, the variable-focus
spectacle lens, self-darkening spectacle lenses, soft contact lenses, the optical mouse, and the
remote control for an appliance, as well as the display screens of televisions, computers, and
mobile phones.
Between 1975 and 1990 developments of new lasers and their applications spurred
demonstration of new medical innovations. The LASIK technique for vision correction based
on the use of an excimer laser was developed and has now been used on 30,000,000 patients.
Optics and ber optics have made detecting pathologies in patients more reliable and less
invasive. Laparoscopic surgeries are performed today with minimal cuts because ber optic
endoscopes or miniaturized cameras can be inserted to give the surgeon vision of the problem
that must be dealt with. Photodynamic therapy in which a laser is used to excite a dye that
183
preferentially locates in tumorous tissues is another area in which optics and medical treatment have
come together.
During this period spectacular progress was made in optical astronomy. The Hubble Space
Telescope was launched and, after its optics were repaired, it performed spectacularly. It provided data
on the content of the universe such as the number of galaxies and the presence of dark matter
surrounding galaxies. Ground-based telescopes were designed and built that took advantage of
adaptive optics to build large-aperture, segmented-mirror instruments that can minimize atmospheric
distortions and provide superb images. These telescopes could be much larger than space telescopes
and could gather more light from distant objects. Using image processing techniques and modern
computers, it is now possible to link optical telescopes to greatly enlarge their effective aperture.
Whenever the eld of optics is mentioned to non-optics people in the eld of optics, they
immediately think of their eyeglasses or contact lenses. And why not? Almost everyone will use
spectacles or contacts at some point in his or her life and if they live long enough will have an implanted
lens as part of cataract surgery. Progress in these areas has been remarkable. Contact lenses were
invented that allow air to pass through, enabling long periods of comfortable wearing. In addition,
contact lenses can now provide astigmatic correction. Spectacle lenses with continuously variable
strength eliminated the need for bifocal lenses with a sharp delineation between near and distance
viewing sections. Then photochromic lens materials became available enabling the wearer to no longer
need different spectacles indoors and outdoors; the lenses would lighten and darken according to the
ambient light environment.
By 1990 optics included light sources from continuously operating very stable lasers to lasers
producing pulses as short as a few picoseconds (now a few tens of attoseconds). Optics included
components small enough to be swallowed to 30-meter-diameter segmented telescope mirrors.
Displays were getting so small as to be worn in a head-mounted device or so large as to be seen
by 100,000 people in a stadium. Most interesting and important was that applications of optics beyond
those that aid vision had become part of everyday life and so ubiquitous that most went unnoticed.
184
Introduction
19751990
The Shift of Optics R&D Funding and

Performers over the Past 100 Years
C. Martin Stickley
n the earliest days of the past century, advancements in optics were led by newly created
optics companies: Kodak and its research laboratory, Bausch & Lomb, and the American
Optical Company. George Eastman led the effort to found the Kodak Research Laboratory
in 1912 because he saw the connection between optical science and development of new
products. The Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester was not founded until 1929,
after ten years of discussions. As for government, Thomas Edison urged in 1915 that a national
laboratory be formed to attack issues faced by the U.S. Navy. While this resulted in the
establishment of the Naval Research Laboratory in 1923, the (Physical) Optics Division was
not formed until after World War II.
In July 1945 during the closing days of World War II, Vannevar Bush, the Director of the
Ofce of Scientic Research and Development, in response to a request from President Franklin
Roosevelt issued an extensive report entitled Sciencethe Endless Frontier, which urged the
government to establish and fund a broad program in science and applied research to ght
disease, develop national security, and aid the public welfare. It urged that basic science and longterm applied research be supported in universities, that nearer-term applied research and
development be funded in industry, and that military research be increased and tied to university
and industry R&D programs as appropriate. It estimated the cost of this program to be $10
million at the outset rising to perhaps $50 million within ve years. One of the recommendations
was to create the National Science Foundation
Congress created the Ofce of Naval Research (ONR) in 1946 with the Naval Research
Laboratory being its principal operational arm. In light of the wartime success in developing the
proximity fuse, the Division of Ordnance Research was transferred from the National Bureau of
Standards to create the Armys Diamond Ordnance Fuse Laboratory. The Army also created a
laboratory for electronics research at Ft. Monmouth in New Jersey. The Air Force was spun out
of the U.S. Army in 1947, leading to the creation of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Laboratories in Dayton, Ohio; the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, which had Infrared Optics as one of its major divisions; and the Air Force
Weapons Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Further, the MIT Radiation Laboratory at
MIT, which was so successful during the war in radar development, was expanded and relocated
near the small town of Lincoln, Massachusetts, and renamed the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. All of
these played a major role in modern optics and laser development.
Corporate labs were established and grew after the war. Some of them were at GE, Bell Labs,
RCA Laboratories, Hughes Research Laboratory, Westinghouse Research Laboratory,
Raytheon, Texas Instruments, Perkin-Elmer, and Boeing. Figure 1 is an aerial photo of the
iconic Bell Holmdel Laboratory. The growth of corporate labs was aided by scal help that
resulted from the Vannevar Bush report and two events that accelerated the science and
technology of and funding for optics dramatically: the launch of the Soviet Sputnik in 1957
and the demonstration of the laser in 1960.
In 1958 in direct response to Sputnik, President Eisenhower created the Advanced Research
Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Defense Department. One of the U.S.s limitations was a lack
of broad and deep materials capability. Thus, ARPA initiated the Interdisciplinary Laboratories
185
(IDL) program in 1960 to ensure that

chemists, physicists, and electrical and mechanical engineers work together to solve
the difcult research problems in materials
development. This program led to the creation of the eld of materials science.
The 12 universities funded in this program
were MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Illinois,
Stanford, University of Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Brown, Chicago, Northwestern,
Purdue, and University of North Carolina.
A major success of the IDL program was
the development of the science and technology of electronic materials, especially III-V
Fig. 1. Aerial view of Bell Holmdel Laboratory. (Courtesy of
materials such as GaAs and ternary and
AT&T/Bell Labs.)
quaternary mixtures of them. These materials systems have been the success story of
diode lasers and photonics more generally, and the scientists who went on to industrial laboratories to
develop these materials systems for specic applications in optics were likely trained in one of the IDLs.
With government funding enabling universities to supply highly skilled people to industry who
would lead in the revolution in optics brought on by the laser, we will concentrate on that history
because it is in many ways symbolic of the transitions that took place in basic research in optics.
This is not to say that other subjects such as advances in still and motion picture photography, CCD
cameras, polaroid photography, electrophotographic (xerographic) copiers, laser printers, point-ofsale scanners, optical storage devices, laser machining, and optical communication systems
could not show the same transitions; it is just that the laser revolution presents the changes most
powerfully.
Simultaneously with the initiation of the IDL program was the demonstration of the rst laser. This
occurred at an industrial research laboratory using internal fundsthe Hughes Research Laboratory
(HRL) in Malibu, California, on 16 May 1960. As soon as other corporate labs heard in July of Ted
Maimans success, their efforts accelerated. TRG, a small company on Long Island, New York, had
been funded by ARPA in 1959 to the tune of $990,000 for laser development and is thought to be the
rst to duplicate Maimans result. A number of military labs including MIT Lincoln Laboratory
immediately initiated laser programs. The author was a 1st lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force at that time
stationed at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory (AFCRL) in Bedford, Massachusetts. He
and Rudolph Bradbury had a ruby laser like Maimans operating by November 1960. A request of
$392 was made for the purchase of capacitors and ashlamps. This request was immediately approved,
as everyone was excited about the prospects of having an operating red laser!
Military labs like AFCRL, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and Air Force Weapons Laboratory
(AFWL) typically had sufcient funding not only to fund their own projects but also to fund industrial
and university proposals in areas of laser R&D that they deemed important. So the decade of the 1960s
was one of intense laser activity, especially in the development of laser range nders and target
designators at HRL and other companies, coherence studies of partially coherent lasers at Rochester
and Brandeis and at TRG, the phenomenon of mode locking that was discovered in Nd:glass lasers by
Tony DeMaria of United Technology Research Center in Connecticut, the development of parametric
oscillators using LiNbO3 at Bell Labs by J. Giordmaine and R. C. Miller and at Stanford by Steve
Harris, the study of the dynamics of laser operation at the University of Rochesters Institute of Optics
by Mike Hercher, and laser-induced damage to ruby and glass at HRL by Connie Guiliano and at
American Optical Company by Charles Koester. These damage studies were funded by ARPA, but the
other efforts (with the exception of the research on parametric oscillators at Bell Labs) were funded with
military laboratory and ONR monies.
Meanwhile, with corporate funding at Bell Labs, Kumar Patel developed the CO2 laser in 1964,
and Joe Geusic developed the Nd:YAG laser in the same year; both lasers are still workhorses today.
186
At American Optical Company, Elias

Snitzer developed the rst Nd:glass rod
laser as well as a Nd:glass ber laser.
About that same time, Bill Bridges of HRL
achieved lasing of argon and krypton.
While these achievements were extremely
noteworthy, looking back at that decade,
the most signicant achievements for
the U.S. telecommunications industry were
the developments of GaAs homojunction
(diode) lasers in 1962 at GE by Robert N.
Hall and N. Holonyak, Jr., and at IBM by
Marshall Nathan using corporate funds,
and by T. M. Quist and R. J. Keyes at MIT
Fig. 2. Aerial view of IBM Watson Laboratory. (Courtesy
Lincoln Laboratory, which had block
of IBM ResearchZurich. Unauthorized use not permitted.
funding by the U.S. Air Force. Initially,
Copyright owner is IBM Zurich at http://www.zurich.ibm.com/
these lasers had to be cooled to liquid
imagegallery/.)
N2 temperatures or below and could operate only as pulsed devices. It took the insight of Herb Kroemer of Varian Associates in Palo Alto,
California, using corporate funds, to realize that if one formed a heterojunction at both sides of the
homojunction where lasing was occurring, the greater bandgap at the heterojuction would prevent
carrier diffusion away from the homojunction, thus leading to the rst continuous-wave diode laser a
year later. Kroemer received the Nobel Prize in 2000 for this achievement. Figure 2 is an aerial photo of
the IBM Watson Laboratory.
With ARPA funding, Roy Paanenen at Raytheon demonstrated a 100-W argon laser that required
a huge ow of cooling water. Also at Raytheon, Dave Whitehouse was the rst to demonstrate a 1-kW
laser with a longitudinal gas-ow CO2 system that seemed as large as a tennis court. Ed Gerry, with
ARPA funding, at AVCO/Everett Research Laboratory developed a owing gas-dynamic CO2 laser that
had the potential for smaller size and ultra-high power because the waste heat in the gaseous medium
could be removed by owing the gas transversely out of the laser resonator. AVCO/Everett with
continued ARPA funding went on to achieve very-high-power operation of the CO2 laser as well as
high-peak-power pulsed operation of rare gas lasers.
As the powers that were achieved by the CO2 laser were high enough to fracture the transparent
materials that were then available, a new effort had to be made to develop better optics for such lasers.
Consequently, the author departed AFCRL in 1971 for ARPA to lead efforts to develop highly
transparent windows and reecting and anti-reecting coatings. The best of the window materials that
were developed were ZnSe and ZnS, and BaF2 by Raytheon (Jim Pappis). Coating development was led
by Maurice Braunstein at HRL and resulted in thorium-containing coatings with reection coefcients
exceeding 99%. Supporting university and industrial contractors were involved in these programs, with
their roles ranging from modeling of optical distortions in high-power windows to development of
techniques to measure absorption coefcients as low as 0.00001 cm-1.
In the 1970s and 1980s, changes began to occur in the corporate world that led the corporations to
reduce funding of research. First, Wall Street and the stock market expected companies to make their
numbers on a quarterly basis as failure to do so would result in stock prices dropping. This led to
corporations investing their money in the short term to the detriment of funding research that paid off
mostly in the long term. Second, it was becoming apparent to management that these labs were perhaps
more of a drain on prots than the corporation could afford as the research labs did not seem able to
convert research results to products that would boost sales. Third, the rise of globalization meant that
these companies faced competition around the world that had not mattered previously. Fourth, the U.S.
Congress had initiated the Small Business Innovative Research Program to fund product development
at businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Each agency of the federal government that had R&D
funds was (and is) required to set aside 2.5% of these funds for such awards. In 1995 this amounted to
$950 million for product development by small businesses. While this is small compared to what U.S.
187
corporations spend annually for R&D, the availability of such funding attracted people to leave
corporate research laboratories to develop their new ideas rather than attempt to do so in the corporate
environment.
At this point, it is natural to ask, Why werent the research labs more efcient at developing new
products? It seems that the researchers were just not close enough to the companies customers to
know what was needed or what could be improved upon [1]. So large companies began cutting back
their research laboratories in the 1970s1990s, if not eliminating them altogether, and moving their
best R&D people nearer to the front line. Instead of looking for major breakthroughs such as a laser,
they concentrated instead on, as the Economist writes, tinkering with todays products rather than pay
researchers to think big thoughts. More often than not, rms hungry for innovation look to mergers
and acquisitions with their peers, partnerships with universities, and takeovers of venture-capitalbacked start-ups [1].
The several changes mentioned above led to a shift of basic research and long-term applied research
to universities and, to a smaller extent, government laboratories. While various government agencies
still fund individual investigator proposals in optics, there has been a dramatic growth in MultiUniversity Research Initiatives (MURIs)designed to tackle important long-range development
objectives. MURIs involve universities and private companies that would be likely to commercialize
the developments of the research done in the MURI. These MURIs thus take on development efforts
that, 30 years ago, would have been done by a company that had its own research laboratory to
perform the fundamental work necessary to develop the new product.
Reference
1. http://www.economist.com/node/8769863.
188
19751990
Through a Glass Brightly:

Low-Loss Fibers for Optical
Communications
Donald B. Keck
echnological breakthroughs develop through years of scientic collaboration and innovation, each discovery built upon the failures and successes of earlier work. Such was the
case with the work on the rst low-loss optical ber. What began with three Corning
scientists searching for a communications solution ultimately created what is now known to be a
key to the Information Age.
In 1948, Claude E. Shannon [1] proved that optical carrier frequencies provided greater
bandwidth than radio or microwave frequencies. But the technology of the day had not yet
caught up with the science. Those looking to apply Shannons work lacked a suitable light
source, modulator, and detector technology as well as any kind of transmission conduit.
Then in 1960, Ted Maiman [2] demonstrated the rst laser. A few laboratories saw it as a
source for optical communications with the bandwidth that Shannon described and began to
research that application. However, it could not be implemented because at that time, a suitable
transmission conduit for light had not yet been invented.
Corning learned of the growing interest in optical communications on 17 June 1966, when
one of its scientists, William Shaver, brought back a request from the British military. They
wanted a single-mode ber (100-m diameter with a 0.75-m core) with a total attenuation of
less than 20 dB/km. This was prior to any publication, such as the Kao and Hockham paper [3],
suggesting that optical bers could be used as a practical communications conduit. The very best
bulk optical glasses of the day had attenuation of around 1000 dB/km. The British request
required an improvement in transparency of 1098 to reach the 20 dB/km goal. Given the science of
the time, it was seemingly impossible. But within Cornings culture of scientic innovation
particularly when it came to discovering new applications for glassan impossible goal was
merely a problem yet to be solved.
This particular problem was handed to Robert Maurer, a physicist known for his work on
light scattering in glasses. Though Bob did not know it at the time, he actually had begun his ber
work a decade earlier. He published two denitive works in 1956 [4] and 1960 [5], indicating
that Cornings ame-hydrolysis fused silica had the lowest Rayleigh scattering of all glasses he
had measured.
These studies were built upon the discoveries of two giants within Cornings history, Frank
Hyde [6] and Martin Nordberg [7]. In 1930, Hyde demonstrated that when vapors of silicon
tetrachloride were passed through a ame in the presence of oxygen, they would hydrolyze to
form a ne powder of very pure silicon dioxide that could be fused into very pure silica glass. He
noted that the normal glass impurities that give rise to absorptive losses in the glass were low.
Nine years later, Nordberg added titanium tetrachloride to Hydes process and formed a verylow-expansion doped fused silica glass.
While these processes had been used at Corning for years, Bob took them in innovative
directions that, ultimately, laid the foundation for the Corning groups invention of low-loss
optical ber. Always the contrarian, and inuenced by his earlier work on light scattering, Bob
189
and a summer intern made a rod-in-tube

(RIT) ber (Fig. 1)the best known processing method at that timeusing Cornings fused silica as the cladding. He
purposely added an impurity to the fused
silica to raise the refractive index of the
core, Nordbergs titanium doped silica, and
obtain light guidance. Losses were still very
high, but Bob was encouraged enough to
request two additional scientists, Peter
Schultz and Donald Keck (the author).
Peter took a fresh look at Hydes
ame hydrolysis process. He built a small
Fig. 1. Illustration of RIT and thin-lm processes for making
boule furnace and began making various
an optical ber preform. (Courtesy of Corning Incorporated.)
doped fused silicas and measuring their
properties. Based on Bobs earlier results, the group of three focused their efforts exclusively on fused
silica bers made by ame hydrolysis. They continued the counterintuitive approach, adding an
impurity to the pure fused silica to raise the refractive index and create the ber core.
So began a time of trial and error. No human endeavor progresses more rapidly than can be
measured. The group began to systematically measure and identify the sources of their optical losses.
They knew absorptive losses were one source, and they struggled to examine the impurities introduced
in the ame hydrolysis glasses that could cause absorption. The best analytic equipment of the day
could measure impurity levels only to the parts-per-million level, and parts-per-billion were needed. An
attempt was also made to evaluate losses in a few centimeters of bulk glass, but this still could not
produce the losses in an actual ber that had gone through all the processing steps. Making their own
bers was the only way to get a thorough understanding of optical losses.
Optical absorption from formation of reduced-titanium (Ti3+) color centers during the hightemperature ber drawing step accounted for about half of the ber loss. At rst the losses were
annealed away by heat-treating the bers at 800C to 1200C. Unfortunately this treatment drastically
weakened the bers as a result of surface crystallization. The other half of the loss originated from lightscattering defects at the corecladding interface. No publication of the day ever mentioned this most
signicant source of loss. The Corning group believed that this loss originated during the RIT process
from dirt in the lab environment.
With each failure a little more was learned until an idea was hit upon that proved to be the key: the
traditional RIT method was abandoned and a new approach was invented. Rather than inserting a core
rod, the group decided to directly deposit a thin layer of core glass inside a carefully ame-polished
cladding tube (Fig. 1). This produced intimate contact between core and clad materials and, it was
hoped, would get rid of the scattering defects observed in the RIT ber.
For those who believe that excellent work can be done only with the very latest equipment, take
note of the Corning lab pictured in Fig. 2. The equipment was crude but effective. A portable lathe
headstock held the rotating cladding tube in front of the ame hydrolysis burner. The burner produced
a soot stream containing titania-doped silica. Initially the soot would not go into the 56-mm hole in
our cladding tube. One of the group spotted the lab vacuum cleaner. Putting this at the end of the
cladding tube beautifully sucked soot from the ame and deposited a uniformly thin layer onto the
inside tube surface. This coated tube was then placed in the ber draw furnace where the soot sintered
into a clear glass layer, the hole collapsed to form a solid rod containing the doped core, and the entire
structure was drawn down into ber.
Measuring that rst low-loss ber was an unforgettable experience. It was late afternoon, and, after
heat-treating a piece of the groups latest ber, the author positioned it in the attenuation measurement
apparatus. With a viewing telescope he could observe and position the focused He-Ne laser beam on the
ber end. When the laser beam hit the ber core, a blindingly bright returning laser beam was produced.
It took a moment to realize that the laser was being retro-reected off the far end of the ber and coming
back through the optical system.
190
Fig. 2.
Photograph of
apparatus for making the rst
low-loss optical ber. (Courtesy
of Corning Incorporated.)
The brilliant laser beam emanating from the end of the ber was so dramatically different from
anything previously seen that it was apparent something special had occurred. With considerable
anticipation, the author measured the ber loss, and to his delight and surprise it was 17 dB/km. With
little sense of history, Donald Kecks excitement was registered in his now fairly well-known lab-book
entry: Whoopee! (Fig. 3).
In 1970 the result was announced to the world when Bob presented the Corning groups paper
Bending losses in single-mode bers at an Institution of Electrical Engineers Conference in London
on analog microwave technology [8]. In that paper, he mentioned that the ber had a total attenuation
of only 17 dB/km, prompting scientists at the conference to remark that at least their 2-in. helical
microwave guides could be lled with lots of optical bers. We also submitted our paper to Applied
Physics Letters, and it was initially rejected! The reviewer commented, It is rather difcult to visualize
an amorphous solid with scattering losses below 20 decibels per kilometer, much less the total
attenuation. Eventually, however, the paper was published [9]. (See Fig. 4.)
The Corning group had done it, but they were far from done. Though revolutionary, their
breakthrough ber solution was not exactly robust. Only small preforms could be made, and the
heat treatment required to achieve low attenuation made the bers brittle. Also, the preferred ber
design had shifted to multi- rather than single-mode. The larger core diameter was believed necessary
to more easily couple light into the ber from the relatively crude semiconductor lasers of the day.
To make such bers, Peter, our colleague Frank Zimar, and the author invented another ame
hydrolysis approach later dubbed outside vapor deposition. In this method, rst core and then
cladding soot were deposited onto a removable rotating rod to build up a porous soot preform. Because
of the lower temperature in this process, Peter found he could incorporate new dopants that had
vaporized in the higher-temperature boule process. One of these dopants was germania, a glass former
like silica.
In June 1972, the rst ber incorporating germania was drawn in the core. The group was
obviously on the right track, as the bright light of the draw furnace was still visible through the end of a
kilometer of ber on the wind-up drum. The loss measured was only 4 dB/km, no heat treatment was
needed, and ber strength was excellent. This was the rst truly practical low low-loss ber.
This writing marks the 42nd anniversary of the Corning groups invention of low-loss optical ber.
With more than 1.6 billion kilometers of it wrapped around the globe, a world has been created that is
dependent upon reliable, speed-of-light access to people and information anywhere, anytime, through
almost any device of their choosing. The dramatic increase in users has brought with it unprecedented
demand for bandwidth. Several sources, including a University of Minnesota Internet Trafc Study and
Cisco, have estimated that the average Internet trafc today worldwide is 150 Tb/s and growing at
about 50% per year.
191
Fig. 3. Laboratory
notebook with the rst sub-20dB/km ber measurement.
(Courtesy of Corning
Incorporated.)
This growth rate is not surprising. Collectively we have moved from simple audio to increasing
video content in our communications. Estimates are that two-thirds of the mobile data trafc will be
video by 2015 as social networking continues to explode. People sending data is one thing, but
machines-talking-to-machines (M2M) as is happening increasingly is yet another. The latter will
overtake the former in just two or three yearsall this without even considering potential new datagenerating applications. We are already seeing the deployment of ber-enabled remote sensors to
monitor our environment. Power lines and highway and civil structure monitors provide an optical ber
safety net supporting the infrastructure we rely upon every day. Emerging biomedicine and biotechnology applications ranging from transmission of x-ray data to real-time high-denition video for
remote surgeries to the potential petabytes involved in DNA data transmission and analysis are still in
the future. It is now well established that creative people will invent new ways to use the bits if
technology can provide improved cost of transmitting the bit.
The amount of information that can be transmitted over a single ber today is staggering.
Commercial core networks today operate at 50 Tb/s on a single ber, and as reported at OFC
2012, scientists are achieving in their labs record data rates of more than 305 Tb/s.
While this capacity is enormous, ber bandwidth is niteperhaps only 10 times higher
than todays core network trafc level. Our current demand for bandwidth will most likely exceed
our capacity before 2030. This would require a beginning over-build of the core networks even
as we nish the build-out of the local loop! We should not be surprised if the 1.6-billionkilometer ber network of today will be but a fraction of that which will exist in just a couple of
decades.
192
Fig. 4.
Applied Physics
Letters paper [10] on the
ultimate ber losses and
predicting that a 0.2 dB/km loss
would be possible near
1550 nm. (Reproduced with
permission from D. Keck,
R. Maurer, and P. Schultz, Appl.
Phys. Lett. 22, 307 (1973).
1973, AIP Publishing LLC.)
But beyond all the bits and bytes, the most important story of the communications revolution
brought about by optical ber may well be the one about improving human lives. All of us who have
worked and continue to work in optical ber communications technology have truly made the world a
better placeand for that we should be proud.
When asked about glass, most people still picture something breakable that shatters when dropped.
But low-loss optical ber has shown us that hair-thin strands of glass lled with light are strong enough
to help people all over the world shatter long-held assumptions and break down centuries-old political
and cultural walls.
In 2000, the United Nations created the Millennium Project, aimed at lifting millions of people in
the developing world from impoverishment, illness, and death. One of the primary methods for
achieving that objective was to deploy the benets of optical ber technology for their education and
economic betterment.
The International Telecommunications Union continues to track progress toward that end. In 2011
they reported that today, thanks to optical ber, more than two billion people around the world are
instantaneously and simultaneously accessing the Internet, virtually 75% of the worlds rural population has cell phone coverage, and more than 60% of the worlds countries have a National Research
and Education network.
We have come a long way since we rst stood on the shoulders of those giants of early optical
communications. Today the optical ber network has become the lifeblood of our society, providing the
medium through which commerce and culture are being simultaneously created and communicated on
a personal and global scale. We can never be sure just what the future of optical communications holds,
but given the remarkable history of low-loss ber, it is fairly certain to be a future full of light.
References
1. C. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (University of Illinois Press,
1949).
2. T. H. Maiman, Stimulated optical radiation in ruby, Nature 187, 493404 (1960).
3. C. Kao and G. Hockham, Dielectric-bre surface waveguides for optical frequencies, Proc. IEE 113,
11511158 (1966).
4. R. D. Maurer, Light scattering by neutron irradiated silica, J. Phys. Chem. Solids 17, 4451 (1960).
5. R. D. Maurer, Light scattering by glasses, J. Chem. Phys. 25, 12061209 (1956).
193
6. J. F. Hyde, Method of making a transparent article of silica, U.S. patent 2,272,342 (10 February
1942).
7. M. Nordberg, Glass having an expansion lower than that of silica, U.S. patent 2,326,059 (3 August
1943).
8. F. P. Kapron, D. Keck, and R. D. Maurer, Bending losses in single-mode bers, in IEE Conference on
Trunk Telecommunication by Guided Waves, London, 1970.
9. F. P. Kapron, D. Keck, and R. Maurer, Radiation losses in glass optical waveguides, Appl. Phys. Lett.
17, 423425 (1970).
10. D. Keck, R. Maurer, and P. Schultz, On the ultimate lower limit of attenuation in glass optical
waveguides, Appl. Phys. Lett. 22, 307309 (1973).
194
19751990
Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplier:

From Flashlamps and Crystal
Fibers to 10-Tb/s Communication
Michel Digonnet
he deployment of the worlds optical telecommunication network starting in the 1980s

was a major change of paradigm in modern society that enabled the Information Age.
From a technical standpoint, of the many technologies without which this colossal
achievement would have never seen the light of dayfrom frequency-stable laser sources to
efcient low-noise detectors, division wavelength multiplexers, optical lters, and low-noise
high-speed electronicsperhaps none was as decisive and challenging as the ber-optic amplier
(FOA) in general, and the erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA) in particular. Like the optical
ber itself, the EDFA had no good alternative; had it not existed, no other component would
have been available, then or now, to perform its vital function as nearly perfectly as it does.
The basic idea of transmitting data encoded on light carried by optical bers dates back to at
least the 1960s. Early incarnations of optical communication links used electronic repeaters that
periodically detected, amplied, and remodulated the traveling light signals. Such repeaters
worked adequately for high-speed communications over planetary distances, but they required
power and costly high-speed electronics. By then the potential of replacing them with optical
ampliers, devices that would amplify the modulated signals without the need for electronics,
had already been formulated. Optical ampliers already existed, and they offered, at least on
paper, multiple advantages, including an unprecedented bandwidth in the multiterahertz range.
Yet it took nearly three decades of gradually intensifying research in numerous laboratories
around the world to turn this concept into a reality, which involved, among other things,
developing a practical optical amplier utilizing a ber as the gain medium.
From the start, the development of FOAs was riddled with challenges. To be successful in a
communication network, an amplier had to meet tough criteria. It had to provide a high, nearly
wavelength independent gain over a broad spectral range while also incorporating an efcient
means of mixing the excitation source with the incoming signal, being internally energy efcient,
preserving the single-mode character of the trunk ber, and inducing negligible crosstalk between
channels. In later years other requirements were added to this list that further complicated the
task. In retrospect, it is easy to trivialize the now well-known solutions to these problems. But
back in the 1970s and 1980s when these problems were being tackled, there was nothing obvious
about them, and, as in other scientic pursuits, many potential solutions were proposed, tested,
and discarded.
The rst report of amplication in a ber appeared in a famous article published in 1964 by
Charles Koester and Elias Snitzer in The Optical Societys (OSAs) Applied Optics, just four years
after the demonstration of the rst laser [1]. This historic amplier consisted in a 1-m Nd-doped
glass ber coiled around a pulsed ashlamp and end-probed with 1.06-m pulses. This visionary
device already contained several of the key elements of modern FOAs, including a clad glass ber
doped with a trivalent rare earth, an optical pump, and means of reducing reections from the
ber ends to avoid lasing. It provided a small-signal gain as large as 47 dB, which is remarkable
considering that it came out so early in the history of modern photonics. For his many
195
contributions to the elds of FOAs and lasers, Elias Snitzer was awarded the OSAs Charles H. Townes
Award in 1991 and the John Tyndall Award in 1994.
Like almost all the laser devices of the time, this ber amplier was side-pumped: the pump was
incident on the ber transversally. This made the device bulky, inefcient, and ultimately impractical.
The concept of a ber amplier in which the pump is end-coupled into the ber emerged years later as
part of efforts carried out at Stanford University to develop a compact ber amplier. This work
involved end-pumping Nd-doped crystal bers with an argon-ion laser. This work demonstrated that
end-pumping could produce sizeable gain (5 dB) from a very short ber (cm).
The second key improvement was the introduction of the wavelength-division-multiplexing
(WDM) coupler to mix the pump and the signal and end-couple them simultaneously into the gain
ber. The advantages of this technique were overwhelming: it made it possible to efciently inject, with
a compact and mechanically stable device, both the pump and the signal into the gain medium. It took
several years before it was adopted, in part because commercial WDM couplers were almost
nonexistent. It is now the standard technique used in the vast majority of FOAs.
Another concept critical to the performance of FOAs in general, and bench-tested rst with EDFAs,
is that they should use a single-mode ber. Although in recent years new ndings have suggested that
the data transmission capacity could be increased by using multimode bers, in current telecommunication links a single-mode FOA offers two key advantages, namely, a higher gain per unit pump power
due to the higher pump intensity and the elimination of modal coupling, which would otherwise induce
time-dependent losses at the trunk ber/FOA interfaces.
It was known as early as the 1980s that the third communication window, centered around
1550 nm, was the most promising candidate for long-haul ber links, because in this spectral range both
the loss and dispersion of conventional single-mode silica bers are minimum. Trivalent erbium ions
(Er3+) in a variety of amorphous and crystalline hosts had also long been known to provide gain in this
wavelength range, so this ion was a natural candidate. David Payne, who would receive the OSAs John
Tyndall Award in 1994 for his pioneering work on EDFAs, and his team at the University of
Southampton were rst to demonstrate this potential experimentally with the report of the rst EDFA
in 1987 [2,3]. This was followed later the same year by a similar paper from Bell Laboratories. These
milestone publications provided experimental proof that single-pass gains exceeding 20 dB were readily
attainable in single-mode Er-doped bers (EDFs) end-pumped with the best laser wavelengths available
at the time, namely, 670 nm and 514.5 nm. Another key property that made Er3+ so attractive is that the
lifetime of its 1550-nm transition is unusually long (510 ms); hence the population inversion and the
gain essentially do not respond dynamically at the very high modulation frequencies of the signals
(unlike semiconductor ampliers). The important
consequence is that the crosstalk between signals
being amplied simultaneously in an EDFA can be
exceedingly small (see Fig. 1) [4], a crucial property
for communications.
The EDFA seemed to be a great candidate, but
several issues, some perceived to be critical by the
communication community, made it difcult to be
accepted right away. In fact, it took nearly another
decade of detailed engineering and the development
of several parallel technologies (diode lasers and
fused WDM couplers, in particular) to make this
device a reality.
To be practical, the EDFA had to be pumped
with a semiconductor laser. Over time several pump
Fig. 1. Measured crosstalk between two channels,
sources and wavelengths were investigated. This
characterized by the peak-to-peak gain variation
battle was one of the most technically challenging
induced in a rst signal (channel A) by a second signal
and interesting in the history of the EDFA. The
(channel B) sinusoidally modulated at frequency f.
proliferation of inexpensive GaAs diode lasers in
[C. R. Giles, E. Desurvire, and J. R. Simpson, Opt. Lett.
the 800-nm range in the electronic products of the
14, 880882 (1989)].
196
late 1980s led to substantial research on 800-nm

pumping, in particular at British Telecom Research
Laboratories. However, they found that the gain
efciency was low. The reason was later identied
as the unfortunate presence of excited-state absorption around 800 nm in Er3+, a limitation that could
not be sufciently reduced by adjusting the pump
wavelength or the glass composition.
Much of this research soon focused on two
pump wavelengths only, namely, 980 nm from the
then-emerging strained GaAlAs laser technology
and around 1480 nm from InGaAsP diode lasers.
The prevalent thinking was initially that since an
EDFA pumped at 1480 nm is nearly a two-level
laser system, it should be difcult to invert and
exhibit a poor noise performance. The demonstration of the rst EDFA pumped at 1.49 m by Elias
Snitzer in 1988 quickly changed this perception.
The following year saw the rst report of an EDFA
Fig. 2. Measured gain and gain coefcient in an
EDFA pumped at 980 nm and 1480 nm. Circles, 980 nm;
pumped at 1480 nm with an InGaAsP diode laser, at
triangles, 1480 nm. (Reproduced with permission of the
NTT Optical Communication Laboratory in Japan.
Institution of Engineering and Technology.)
This spectacular result (12.5 dB of gain for 16 mW
of absorbed pump power) put the EDFA on a new
track by establishing that a packaged FOA was within reach. For a short while pumping at 980 nm was
the underdog, in part because it had a higher quantum defect than 1480-nm pumping, hence an
expected lower efciency, and in part because of the lower maturity of the strained GaAlAs technology.
But 980-nm pumping nevertheless eventually won. Stimulated emission at 1480 nm turned out to be a
serious penalty, which gave a lower pump efciency and noise performance than with a 980-nm pump.
M. Shimizu and his team at NTT illustrated this compromise clearly in a cornerstone paper [5] that
compared the gain of an EDFA pumped at either wavelength (Fig. 2). The gain and the gain per unit
pump power (11 dB/mW!) were all substantially higher with 980-nm pumping, and the transparency
threshold was lower. This new understanding triggered a substantial R&D effort in the semiconductor
laser community, which ultimately lead to the commercialization of reliable, high-power, long-lifetime
diode lasers at 980 nm.
Many other important engineering issues were addressed through the mid-1990s. Two teams
contributed to this major effort more prominently than any other, namely, David Paynes group at the
University of Southampton [2,3] and Emmanuel Desurvive, rst at the AT&T Bell Laboratories, then at
Columbia University and Alcatel in France [6]. Many other substantial contributions came out of academic
and industrial laboratories around the world, especially in the U.S., UK, Denmark, Japan, and France.
A signicant fraction of the research was consumed by the quest for ever greater gain bandwidth,
lower noise, and a gain that is nearly independent of signal polarization, signal power, and number of
channels. To increase the bandwidth a number of ingenious solutions were implemented, ranging from
hybrid EDFs concatenating bers of different compositions and slightly offset gain spectra to adjusting the
level of inversion to produce preferential gain in the C band (15301565 nm) or L band (15651625 nm)
or designing the EDF so that it does not guide well above 1530 nm to produce efcient gain in the S band
(14601530 nm). This effort was greatly complicated by the parallel need for a uniform gain (or at gain
spectrum) so that all channels have a similar power and signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver. Here too,
clever solutions were conceived, from using passive lters to hybrid EDFAs, gain clamping, and the use of
telluride bers. This last approach produced a gain with a remarkable bandwidth of 80 nm (see Fig. 3) [7].
Later renements produced EDFAs with a gain atness well under 1 nm over wide bandwidths [8].
The EDFA rose from the status of research device to stardom remarkably rapidly, a resounding
manifestation of its practical importance, exceptional performance, and timeliness. The rst commercial EDFA appeared in 1992. By 1998 over 40 companies were selling EDFAs; the count ultimately
197
peaked above 100. Research on communication systems followed suit, leading to the demonstration of increasingly large and high-performance
experimental and deployed systems. As one of
many examples illustrating the phenomenal performance of communication links utilizing EDFAs,
in a particular experiment a total of 365 signals
were simultaneously recirculated 13 times around a
500-km ber loop containing ten EDFAs (one
every 50 km). At the output the power imbalance
between channels was as low as -7 dB and the biterror rate only 10-13. This system accomplished a
remarkable total optical reach of 6850 km and a
total capacity as high as 3.65 Tb/s. Deployed links
Fig. 3. Measured gain spectrum of a 0.9-m-long
tellurite EDFA at various input-signal power levels. The
now exceed 10 Tb/s over even longer distances.
gain in the 15351570-nm range was compressed by
In the early 2000s, following the saturation of
using higher-power input signals. [Y. Ohishi, A. Mori,
the
telecommunication
industry and the sharp deM. Yamada, H. Ono, Y. Nishida, and K. Oikawa,
cline in the worlds markets, a signicant percentage
Opt. Lett. 23, 274276 (1998)].
of the optical communication task force redirected
its vast technical expertise to other areas of photonics. This concerted effort gave the EDFA and other
FOAs a second carrier in spectacular new applications, especially ber sensors and high-power ber
lasers. Using an FOA to amplify the output of a ber laser, in a now widely used conguration called the
master-oscillator power amplier (MOPA), turned out to be the most energy-efcient way to produce
extremely clean and spectrally pure laser outputs up to enormous power levels. Today, ber MOPAs
are the worlds brightest light sources, to a large extent thanks to the superb properties of ber
ampliers. Yb3+, in particular, rapidly became the workhorse of high-power ber lasers for its low
quantum defect and high quenching-free concentration. Power scaling posed signicant challenges,
including efcient coupling into the gain ber of the high required pump powers, wavelength
conversion due to stimulated Brillouin and Raman scattering, optical damage, and photodarkening.
These challenges were met with a number of clever engineering solutions, including large-mode-area
bers (in which the signal intensity, and hence nonlinear effects and optical damage, are reduced) and
acoustic anti-guiding bers (in which the spatial overlap between acoustic and optical modes, and hence
the nonlinearity, are reduced). Commercial ber lasers utilizing MOPA congurations now offer
average powers up to the 100-kW range, a feat that would not have been possible without the superb
attributes of FOAs.
References
1. C. J. Koester and E. Snitzer, Amplication in a ber laser, Appl. Opt. 3, 11821186 (1964).
2. R. J. Mears, L. Reekie, I. M. Jauncey, and D. N. Payne, High gain rare-earth doped bre amplier
operating at 1.55 m, Proceedings of OFC, Reno, Nevada, 1987.
3. R. J. Mears, L. Reekie, I. M. Jauncey, and D. N. Payne, Low-noise erbium-doped bre amplier
operating at 1.54 m, Electron. Lett. 23, 10261028 (1987).
4. C. R. Giles, E. Desurvire, and J. R. Simpson, Transient gain and cross talk in erbium-doped ber
ampliers, Opt. Lett. 14, 880882 (1989).
5. M. Shimizu, M. Yamada, M. Horiguchi, T. Takeshita, and M. Okayasu, Erbium-doped bre ampliers
with an extremely high gain coefcient of 11.0 dB/mW, Electron. Lett. 26, 16411643 (1990).
6. M. Desurvire, Erbium-Doped Fiber AmpliersPrinciples and Applications (Wiley, 1994).
7. Y. Ohishi, A. Mori, M. Yamada, H. Ono, Y. Nishida, and K. Oikawa, Gain characteristics of telluritebased erbium-doped ber ampliers for 1.5-mm broadband amplication, Opt. Lett. 23, 274276
(1998).
8. M. J. F. Digonnet, Rare-Earth-Doped Fiber Lasers and Ampliers (Marcel Dekker, 2001).
198
19751990
Advent of Continuous-Wave
Room-Temperature Operation of
Diode Lasers
Michael Ettenberg
he story of getting to room temperature continuous-wave (CW) operation of semiconductor diode lasers will start when the author arrived at RCA Labs with a fresh Ph.D. in
June of 1969. RCA had decided that GaAs would be the next important semiconducting
material in the solid-state electronics business after germanium, which at the time was the most
prevalent transistor material. While silicon transistors were already being manufactured, GaAs
transistors would be far superior, and RCA Research Lab researchers would concentrate their
efforts on GaAs and related compounds to leapfrog silicon. The choice had some validity. GaAs
was a direct-band semiconductor and thus had shorter electron hole lifetimes and a larger
bandgap, making possible transistors with higher speed, less temperature dependence, higher
operational temperature ranges, and smaller size. While all this is true, silicon became the pervasive
electronic device material for a variety of good reasons that will not be detailed here. But GaAs and
its related direct bandgap materials could do something that silicon could not do, that is, emit light
efciently. So RCA Labs moved its GaAs efforts to develop LEDs and diode lasers.
The authors rst assignment was to grow AlAs epitaxially on GaAs single-crystal
substrates via vapor-phase epitaxy, where Al is transported by passing HCl gas over Al and
As is supplied by breaking down arsine. After AlAs growth characterization, devices became of
interest. Since it seemed easier to make devices out of new materials than to create the materials
themselves, the author joined a group headed by Henry Kressel working on laser diodes. These
small devices were fascinating, as they were able to put out large amounts of reasonably
directed light, albeit they could be seen only with a night vision scope. There were four
relatively large research efforts at the time: Bell Labs the largest by far, Standard Telecommunications Laboratory (STL) in England, RCA Labs, and the Russian effort, about which less
was known, mainly due to the cold war. At IBM, GE, and Lincoln Labs, even though diode
lasers were rst demonstrated there, research efforts were not substantial. The research
projects at Bell Labs and STL were considerable, supported by telephone usage; telephone
companies were utilities at time. The telephone giants rst saw lasers as a potential source for
free-space communications, a secondary effort compared with microwave transmission in air
and pipes until Charles Kao envisioned optical communications in bers [1] and research at
Corning demonstrated low-loss optical bers in 1970 [2]. Then the laser efforts intensied.
RCAs research was driven by other applications such as optical disc recording and playback
and military usage. Since RCA had an Aerospace and Defense division, the diode laser efforts
could be justied, but RCA as a corporation was focused on television, and lasers were not a
mainline effort. The research was about half supported by the corporation and half by
government research contracts. The rst applications of laser diodes were military in nature,
and RCA decided to make the devices commercially so they could supply them to their defense
customers and potentially lower the price by supplying them for other commercial uses. In
1969 RCA became the rst commercial supplier of laser diodes, although it was a miniscule
business, especially for a multi-billion-dollar corporation.
199
The author was introduced to diode

lasers by Herb Nelson, who invented liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) the process used
to fabricate lasers throughout their initial
development, well past the rst CW
demonstrations and many years beyond,
through the rst several years of CD player
manufacture. Today almost all lasers are
made by metal organic chemical vapor
deposition (MOCVD): a much better controlled process and one that can be readily
Fig. 1. First liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) growth apparatus for
scaled up to multiple large wafers. What
creating laser diode (tipping furnace). (H. Nelson, RCA Rev.
Herb demonstrated was called a tipping
24, 603 [1963]. Courtesy of Alexander Magoun.)
furnace (as shown in Fig. 1); it was a
tubular furnace about six inches in diameter mounted in a metal cage. The cage was in turn mounted
in a seesaw arrangement at the center of the furnace so the furnace could be rocked back and forth or
tipped. Inside the furnace was a sealed quartz tube with hydrogen owing through it and a carbon boat;
at one end of the boat was a small polished single-crystal GaAs wafer of about a square centimeter, and
at the other end of the boat was a polycrystalline GaAs wafer with a glob of gallium on it. The process
started with the furnace being heated to about 800C with the polycrystalline GaAs and Ga side lower,
and some time was allowed so the GaAs could go into solution in the Ga until saturation; then the
furnace was tipped the other way and the saturated Ga rolled onto the single-crystal wafer. Next
the furnace was cooled and the GaAs in solution precipitated onto wafer to form an epitaxial layer on
the single crystal. This epitaxial layer was much superior in terms of contaminants and defects to the
underlying substrate and was also superior in terms of its luminescent properties and ability to make
lower-threshold, more efcient lasers. Al was added to the Ga glob so that AlGaAs alloys could
be grown. Al and Ga atoms are about the same size; therefore dislocations caused by lattice parameter
mismatch would not be formed when AlGaAs was grown on GaAs. In addition, adding Al to GaAs
raised the bandgap and lowered the index of refraction of the alloy compared to GaAs, which proved to
be crucially important to the creation of low-threshold efcient lasers. The temperature was controlled
by hand, using a variable transformer to control the current to the furnace and a 01000C dial
thermocouple readout. It was amazing how such a crude growth system could produce such
sophisticated devices, but Herb understood the materials and was an artist. Later the process was
brought under better control using carbon boats with a wafer that slid under multiple bins to allow
growth of multiple layers with controlled composition and remarkable submicrometer-thickness
accuracy.
The rst diode lasers were simply millimeter-sized cubes of GaAs containing a diffused pn junction
with polished faces for mirrors that operated at liquid nitrogen temperatures with multi-amp very-lowduty-cycle short pulses applied. It was remarkable that these devices lased, considering that all prior laser
types required tens of centimeters of cavity length and mirror reectivity greater than 95%. The gain in
GaAs per unit length was exceptional, thus allowing the gain to exceed the loss even though the reectivity
at the natural mirror surface of GaAs is only about 30%. The applied current to these rst devices was
many tens of thousands of amperes per square centimeter at liquid nitrogen temperatures; the threshold
current increased exponentially as the temperature increased, so room temperature CW lasing was a long
way away. It was found early on that GaAs cleaved nicely on the 100-crystal plane, so the lasers were
grown on single-crystal wafers cut on the 100 plane. Then the mirror facets could be easily formed after
the wafers had been thinned, metalized on the n and p sides by cleaving into bars. Next the bars were
sawed into individual dies about 400 m in length between the mirrors and 100 m wide. The sawn
roughened sides prevented lasing from occurring crosswise to the mirrors.
There were three important steps to room-temperature CW lasing: the addition of heterojunctions
to the laser structure, the double heterojunction, and nally, the stripe contact. In 1969 independently
and simultaneously, Kressel and Nelson [3] and Panish et al. [4] published papers demonstrating that
adding heterojunctions of AlGaAs on GaAs and diffusing the pn junction a micrometer or so from the
200
Fig. 2.
Schematic cross
section of various laser
structures showing the electric
eld distribution E in the active
region, variation of the bandgap
energy Eg, and variation of the
refractive index n at the lasing
photon energy.
(a) Homojunction laser made by
liquid phase epitaxy, (b) singleheterojunction close-conned
laser, (c) double-heterojunction
laser, and (d) large-opticalcavity (LOC) laser. Figure 5 from
H. Kressel, H. F. Lockwood, I.
Ladany, M. Ettenberg, Opt. Eng.
13, 417422, 1974. (1974
SPIE reprint_permission@spie.
org.)
heterojunction formed a light waveguide. This waveguide conned the light, creating electron/hole
recombination to that waveguide as illustrated in Fig. 2 [5]; consequently, the threshold current could
be reduced to about 10,000 amps/cm2, still a factor of 10 or so away from what would be needed for
CW operation. The reduction in threshold from the simple p-n homojunctions came from the fact that
the light and the recombination of electron and holes was conned to a smaller volume, thus requiring
less current to invert the population to the point of lasing. These single-heterojunction devices were the
rst laser diodes to go into production, becoming optical proximity sensors for the sidewinder missile.
Art DAsaro and colleagues [6, 7] at Bell Labs developed the stripe contact, shown in Fig. 3, which
is a necessary and enduring feature for laser diodes, because it not only stops the cross lasing in a simple
manner but facilitates the heat sinking of the device with unpumped regions all along the laser cavity.
The nal and most important step came from Alferov et al. [8]. Alferov was one of the leaders in the
eld and came to United States to visit RCA and Bell Labs, among others. The visit was memorable,
because it was very strange. We sat in a small ofce and discussed the progress of lasers. Alferov had a
large heavyset man with him who said very little and seemed to know little about lasers; it was surmised
that he was KGB. Alferov did not disclose the double-heterojunction laser structure nor was he shown
much because the work was partially supported by Department of Defense. It was learned later that he
did discuss the double-heterojunction work at Bell Labs, probably because they were more open. There
was a race to achieve CW operation. Bell and RCA Labs were neck and neck, but Bell had the stripecontact technology and learned about the double-hetrojunction structure. As a result, Hayashi and
Fig. 3.
Schematic of a
typical CW heterojunction laser,
drawn upside down to show the
stripe contact. Diffraction
causes the vertical spreading of
the beam. Reproduced with
permission from Fig. 6 of H.
Kressel, I. Ladany, M.
Ettenberg, and H. Lockwood,
Physics Today 29(5), 38 (1976).
(Copyright 1976, American
Institute of Physics.)
201
Panish [9] won the race to CW. The addition of the second heterojunction forced the light and electron/
hole recombination to be conned to a few tenths of a micrometer and allowed thresholds close to
1000 A/cm2, which together with the stripe-heat sinking allowed CW operation at room temperature.
But it was CW in name only. The initial devices lasted only minutes.
To be useful the devices had to live for many thousands of hours, and here the author was able to
make a contribution. One of his rst projects on lasers came from a suggestion by Herb Nelson. He said
they were evaporating SiO2 followed by gold as mirrors on the back facet of the devices to make them
emit out of one end; many of the devices were shorting probably due to pinholes in the oxide. Could the
process be improved? A multi-layer dichroic reector was eventually developed consisting of Si and
Al2O3 as the reector and an Al2O3 passivating and reectivity control layer on the emitting facet [10].
The lifetime of AlGaAs lasers operating at low power was steadily increased to more than a million
hours median time to failure [11, 12] by growing on low-dislocation substrates to eliminate defects
inside the laser and applying the aforementioned passivating optical coatings to the emitting facets.
Such devices helped create the early ber-optic communications systems and were the light sources
for CD and DVD players.
The nal steps to todays modern laser diode were separately conning the light and the electron/
hole recombination rst described by Lockwood et al. [13] as shown in Fig. 2 and the understanding by
Yariv et al. [14] that by making the electron/hole recombination very thin (a few tens of nanometers),
quantum effects would come into play and the gain would substantially exceed what might be expected
for such thin layers. The changes allowed the threshold current to be reduced to close to 100 A/cm2,
allowing lasers to be fabricated with electricity-to-light conversion efciencies exceeding 75%. These
lasers, called separate connement heterojunction quantum well lasers, are the most reliable and
efcient light sources known to man and continue to change our world.
References
1. C. Kao, IEEE Meeting in London, 1966.
2. F. P. Kapron, D. B. Keck, and R. D. Maurer, Radiation losses in glass optical waveguides, Appl. Phys.
Lett. 17, 423425 (1970).
3. H. Kressel and H. Nelson, Close-connement gallium arsenide P-N junction lasers with reduced optical
loss at room temperature, RCA Rev. 30, 106113 (1969).
4. M. B. Panish, I. Hayashi, and S. Sumski, A technique for the preparation of low-threshold roomtemperature GaAs laser diode structures, IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 5, 210 (1969).
5. Figure 5 from H. Kressel, H. F. Lockwood, I. Ladany, and M. Ettenberg, Heterojunction laser diodes
for room temperature operation, Opt. Eng. 13(5), 417422 (1974).
6. Figure 6 from H. Kreseel, I. Ladany, M. Ettenberg, and H. Lockwood, Light sources, Physics Today
29(5), 3842 (1976).
7. J. E. Ripper, J. C. Dyment, L. A. DAsaro, and T. L. Paoli, Stripegeometry double heterostructure
junction lasers: mode structure and cw operation above room temperature, Appl. Phys. Lett. 18, 155
157 (1971).
8. Zh. I. Alferov, V. M. Andreev, E. L. Portnoi, and M. K. Trukan, AlAs-GaAs heterojunction injection
lasers with a low room-temperature threshold, Sov. Phys. Semicond. 3, 11071110 (1970).
10. M. Ettenberg, A new dielectric facet reector for semiconductor lasers, Appl. Phys. Lett. 32, 724725
(1978).
11. R. L. Hartman, N. E. Schumaker, and R. W. Dixon, Continuously operated (Al, Ga)As double
heterostructure lasers with 70 C lifetimes as long as two years, J. Appl. Phys. 31, 756 (1977).
12. M. Ettenberg, Electron. Lett. 14, 615 (1978).
13. H. F. Lockwood, H. Kressel, H. S. Sommers, Jr., and F. Z. Hawrylo, An efcient large optical cavity
injection laser, Appl. Phys. Lett. 17, 499501 (1970).
14. P. L. Derry, A. Yariv, K. Y. Lau, N. Bar-Chaim, K. Lee, and J. Rosenberg, Ultralowthreshold graded
index separateconnement single quantum well buried heterostructure (Al, Ga)As lasers with high
reectivity coatings, Appl. Phys. Lett. 50, 17731775 (1987).
202
19751990

Richard W. Dixon
n the late 1960s, Bell Labs had a problem. The nations demand for long-distance
telecommunications services was steadily increasing, but the technologies then in use
coaxial cable and point-to-point microwave transmission through the aircould not keep
up with the pace. The major reductions in optical ber waveguide losses reported in the early
1970s were therefore of great interest. The lowest-loss regions of these bers were in the 0.8 to
0.9 m range, which could in principle be accessed by devices built using the GaAs-GaAlAs
material system. Thought was given to the possible use of GaAs light-emitting diodes (LEDs), but
it was immediately obvious that semiconductor lasers would be much better sourcesif they
could be developed reliably in commercial quantities. One could easily imagine an efcient GaAs
laser that could couple a milliwatt of optical power into a ber with a core diameter of about
50 m. Thus was dened the rst generation of ber-optic telecommunication systems.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the author was a young supervisor working on the
development of LEDs for Bell System applications. In that process, he learned quite a bit about
the physics, technology, and transfer-to-volume manufacture of III-V semiconductors. One result
of this program was the successful implementation of green-emitting GaP LEDs for nighttime dial
illumination in the handset of the Dreyfuss-designed Trimline phone. Something like 100 million
of these sets were subsequently produced.
In 1973, the author transferred to a small exploratory development group working on
semiconductor lasers. The group had beneted from an excellent research effort that happened
just down the hall. Most notable was the demonstration in 1970 of a continuously operating
room-temperature GaAs-AlGaAs heterostructure semiconductor laser [1] (see Fig. 1). However,
these broad-area lasers had high operating currents (around 400 mA) and very short lives (they
were sometimes referred to as ashbulbs), but they showed the way forward!
The groups choice of a laser structure for initial development consisted of four planar
epitaxial layers grown sequentially by liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE) on a GaAs substrate. We
inhibited lateral carrier ow by using proton bombardment to dene a stripe-geometry
wherein only a narrow stripe, 10 250 m, was electrically pumped (see Fig. 2). These
stripe-geometry lasers became the workhorses of the early Bell Labs semiconductor laser
development. They allowed the sorting out of many reliability and device performance issues. In
a typical week, half a dozen or so wafers were processed into some thousands of lasers. Fast
turnaround made it possible to quickly and systematically iterate device, processing, and material
innovations.
Many of the early stripe-geometry lasers had very erratic properties. Some would lase for a
time but would then suddenly become inoperable. Others would die slowly. Still others would
not work from the outset. Typical continuous-wave operating lifetimes at room temperature
were on the order of minutes to days. Many devices also had other undesirable characteristics,
for example, nonlinear light output versus current. It was clear that the group had a very difcult
development project on its hands! Some thoughtful observers, including one key Bell Laboratories vice president, opined that success was unattainble.
Important clues to improvements came in early 1973 from an experiment in which
windows were fabricated on the substrate side of stripe-geometry lasers in such a way that
spontaneous emission (and scattered stimulated emission if present) from the stripe region of the
laser could be observed with an infrared optical microscope. Dark-line defects (DLDs), which
203
grew in a lasers active region during operation,

were observed and were determined to be the principal failure mechanism in devices that stopped
working in the rst 100 hours or so [2].
This paper correctly stated that the combination of low-strain processes and extreme cleanliness
in materials growth should provide a dramatic
increase in laser life. It galvanized a large technical
community such that it seemed that everyone in the
world with an electron microscope then decided to
investigate this area. A picture was, in this case,
worth many thousand words!
The Bell group subsequently worked hard to
understand and eliminate localized modes of degradation, including those associated with DLDs in the
long narrow-lasing region of the laser and those
associated with mirror surfaces. Subsequent experiments showed that DLDs identical to those seen in
lasers could be generated by optical pumping of
undoped and unprocessed laser material, thus conrming that DLD initiation and growth could result
from properties of laser material that were not
associated with proton bombardment, p-n junction
dopants, or contact metallization technology.
Many improvements in LPE growth technology
and its automation were also made during this
period. Fundamental difculties with this batch
Fig. 1. Izuo Hayashi, holding a heat absorbing
device, points to the location of a broad-area
process made it stubbornly difcult to reproducibly
semiconductor laser designed by Bell Laboratories
control, but it was greatly improved in the skilled
scientists. (Bell Laboratories/Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.,
hands of the Bell groups crystal growers.
courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Hecht
By late 1974, with continuing work on many
Collection.)
technology fronts, the reliability situation had improved considerably, and selected lasers had been operating continuously for more than a year at room
temperature (typically 30C). On the basis of the data obtained, the group was able to conclude that
continuous room-temperature operation of these devices as lasers with power outputs exceeding
1 mW per laser face for times in excess of 100,000 h is possible. This was an important feasibility
demonstration. However, it served to reinforce the urgency of nding ways to condently accelerate
diode aging so that lasers tested for short periods could be installed in the eld with the expectation that
they would last for decades.
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram

of a proton-bombardmentdelineated stripe geometry
GaAs/GaAlAs semiconductor
laser with a window on the
substrate side. Note the four
epitaxial layers of different
composition grown by liquidphase epitaxy [B. C. De Loach,
Jr., B. W. Hakki, R. L. Hartman,
and L. A. DAsaro, Proc. IEEE
61, 1042 (1973)].
204
By early 1977, with continued work on growth and process improvements, screening techniques, and protocols for accelerated aging, it was felt that, for a set of randomly selected lasers, it
was possible to condently predict a median lifetime at 22C at 34 years and a mean time to failure
at 22C at 1.3 million hours (>100 years). The so-called million hour paper, which was published
in 1977 [3], demonstrated that it was possible to construct semiconductor laser devices with very
long lifetimes.
Soon after these results were published, the author attended a conference in England on the general
subject of light emission from semiconductors. During the Q&A, the head of the laser development
program at the Standard Telecommunications Laboratory asked, publicly and rather pointedly, Dick,
would you please tell us the secret of your reliability success? The author puzzled for a moment and
then blurted into the microphone, We do everything very carefully. This brought a good deal of
laughter from the audience, but it was not intended as a joke. It took some years to convince skeptics
that the success of the Bell groups development program required the solution of hundreds of
problems, innovation by scores of outstanding well-motivated people, millions of dollars, systematic
iteration, and a good deal of time. Perhaps its key achievement was the proof of principle that
semiconductor lasers with long lifetimes were possiblea little like Roger Bannisters four-minute mile.
In years since, it has appeared that most business and political leaders, as well as scientists who have not
been involved in difcult high-tech development programs, do not appreciate what it takes to succeed
with these types of endeavors.
In any case, after the groups considerable reliability achievements, the hard parts of the laser
development program still lay ahead. The words of the great statesman Winston Churchill, referring to
much more serious issues than ours, provided some encouragement: Now this is not the end. It is not
even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
As the Bell group became better able to fabricate and age lasers, the testing of device characteristics
and the ability to analytically model these devices were also rened. These developments greatly aided
the early identication of lasers with deciencies and also pointed the way to eliminating those
problems.
The rst applications of these lasers in the Bell System were in system experiments that were not
intended to carry commercial trafc. These used 50-m-core multimode ber and data rates of 45 and
90 Mb/s. After that, they were tried in short-distance trials carrying live trafc, including a successful
May 1977 installation in which bers were used to connect three telephone central ofces in
downtown Chicago. The small physical size and large capacity of the ber system helped to relieve
crowding in the underground (and sometimes underwater) ducts that connected the ofces. Then the
trials became ambitious: In February 1980 at the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York, the
television feed was carried over an experimental optical ber system and broadcast around the world.
Fingers were crossed! In the end, it was fabulous to see the Miracle on Ice performance of the U.S.
mens ice hockey team via the superior television picture made possible by our ber system (see
Fig. 3). These rst-generation lasers were subsequently used in the ber systems for the Northeast
corridor and many other terrestrial trunk applications. Technology proof of principle had become
technology of choice!
The second-generation lasers were designed for use in the 1.3-m window of the improved, singlemode, 5-m-core diameter bers. Their buried-heterostructure design made use of two epitaxial growth
sequences with an etching step in between. Figure 4 shows a 1.7-Gb/s transmitter developed by Optical
Society Fellow Richard G. Smith and his group that made system implementation possible.
The complex fabrication process ultimately produced very high-yield, high-performance, highreliability buried-heterostructure lasers that stayed in volume production from about 1984 to 1997.
These multimode lasers could be used at data rates up to about 2 Gb/s. They were the mainstay of the
Bell Systems 417-Mb/s applications and, later, its FT series G 1.7-Gb/s applications providing the rst
high-speed 1.7-Gb interconnects among some 200 major U.S. cities. These and subsequent lasers came
to possess such high reliability and could be applied in terrestrial trunk and undersea applications
because the Bell System group became increasingly able to screen out lasers that had non-fundamental
modes of degradation. Short-duration high-stress testing, specic to the individual laser design in the
laser certication process, was used.
205
Fig. 3.
The televised feed for the 1980 Olympic Ice Hockey matches (like the one between Canada and the
Netherlands shown here), including the famous Miracle on Ice game, was carried over an experimental ber optic
system.
Subsequently, more-sophisticated InPbased lasers, including designs with distributed feedback gratings to produce a
single, stabilized wavelength [4] were
designed, developed, and manufactured by
the group. An electro-absorption modulator was later incorporated, on the same
chip, into this design. Descendants of these
devicesoperating at data rates as high as
40 Gb/s, but more typically at 10 Gb/s
are useful for wavelength-division-multi Fig. 4. 1.7-Gb/s transmitter.
plexing applications and remain in volume
production in the United States, Japan,
and other parts of the world. They make
use of the ultimate low-loss 1.51.6-m region in modern single-mode bers. Metal organic chemical
vapor deposition technology has now substantially replaced LPE in diode laser manufacture.
During these long, difcult years, the author sometimes pondered the meaning of Wolfgang
Paulis characterization of condensed-matter physics as Schmutzphysik. Did he mean simply
that it was complex and therefore hard? Did he mean that it was difcult literally because
impurities (dirt) at unheard-of small concentrations affect everything? Or did he simply mean that
any elegant physics involved was hidden in an opaque matrix of mud? At times, the author
thought of the groups researchers as the mudders. Fortunately, they ended up nding gold. Bob
Rediker, a professor at MIT and MIT Lincoln Labs, expressed his view of the work leading to
long-lived diode lasers as follows: In the 1980s and early 1990s, I mounted a campaign with
206
Fig. 5.
B. C. DeLoach, R. W. Dixon, and R. L. Hartman receiving the IEEE Gold Medal for Engineering
Excellence in 1993.
others to insist that those who by much hard work made inventions practical be honored. In
particular, I wanted recognition for the team at Bell Telephone Laboratory. They had increased
the mean time to failure at room temperature of the double-heterostructure GaAs-based laser from
several minutes in 1970 to an extrapolated 8 million hours in 1978. Redikers efforts along with
others led to B. C. DeLoach, R. W. Dixon, and R. L. Hartman receiving the IEEE Gold Medal for
Engineering Excellence in 1993 for this work (see Fig. 5).
The groups efforts in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were aimed at Bell System applications in longdistance, high-volume voice, data and video transmissionboth on land and undersea. Today,
essentially all terrestrial and undersea telecommunications, data, and television trafc above the local
distribution level is carried in ber using lasers as sources. The Internet would not be possible without
these laser devices. Undersea cables with long repeaterless spans (approaching 10,000 km) now often
have the high-performance lasers that encode digital information only at the land ends. Much simpler
continuously operating lasers, which carry no signal information, are used to pump ber ampliers that
are periodically spaced under the sea. Data rates in a single ber, using very-high-speed modulation and
wavelength division multiplexing, in high-volume applications, can approach 1 Tb/s20,000 times
higher than the groups initial 45-Mb/s rates!
The program also supported what was then called ber-to-the-home, or colloquially the last
mile. This application took longer to become a reality because of the breakup of the Bell System and
the high costs of serving individual customers. It was pleasing, and a little nostalgic, when about ve
years ago Verizon brought their laser-based FiOS product to the authors home. On the consumer
products side, it has been extremely satisfying to witness the unexpectedly fast and widespread
application of lasers in products such as printers and CD/DVD players and/or the dramatic price
reductions made possible by these high-volume applications. Through the efforts of thousands of
scientists and engineers throughout the world, both the programs the author worked on and their
subsequent applications have succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
The author is grateful to each one of the scores of professional scientists, technologists, and many
others who contributed to the success of the Bell Laboratories semiconductor laser development
program during the last decades of the twentieth century. It was fun being along for the ride.
207
References
2. B. C. De Loach, Jr., B. W. Hakki, R. L. Hartman, and L. A. DAsaro, Degradation of CW GaAs doubleheterojunction lasers at 300 K, Proc. IEEE 61, 10421044 (1973).
3. R. L. Hartman, N. E. Schumaker, and R. W. Dixon, Continuously operated (Al, Ga)As double
heterostructure lasers with 70C lifetimes as long as two years, Appl. Phys. Lett. 31, 756759 (1977).
4. J. L. Zilko, L. Ketelsen, Y. Twu, D. P. Wilt, S. G. Napholtz, J. P. Blaha, K. E. Strege, V. G. Riggs, D. L.
van Haren, S. Y. Leung, P. M. Nitzche, and J. A. Long, Growth and characterization of high yield,
reliable, high-power, high-speed, InP/InGaAsP capped mesa buried heterostructure distributed feedback
(CMBH-DFB) lasers, IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 25, 20912095 (1989).
5. D. P. Wilt, J. Long, W. C. Dautremont-Smith, M. W. Focht, T. M. Shen, and R. L. Hartman,
Channelled-substrate buried-heterostructure InGaAsP/InP laser with semi-insulating OMVPE base
structure and LPE regrowth, Electron. Lett. 22, 869870 (1986).
208
19751990
Terabit-per-Second Fiber
Optical Communication Becomes
Practical
Guifang Li
umans used optical signals intuitively for the purpose of communication in ancient
times. Modern day optical communication systems are instead based on the fundamental understanding of information theory and technological advances in optical
devices and components. The Optical Society (OSA) played a vital role in making ber-optic
communication practical for the information age.
It is well known that the capacity of a communication channel is constrained by the Shannon
limit, W log2(1 + S/N), where W is the spectral bandwidth and S/N is the signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR). The bandwidth of a communication channel is proportional to the carrier frequency, which
is on the order of 200 THz for visible or near-infrared light. Therefore, a small fractional
bandwidth around the optical carrier can provide a capacity much larger than the limited capacity
supported by the spectrum of radio-frequency (RF) waves or microwaves [1]. The SNR of a
communication channel is proportional to the received power and inversely proportional to the
noise and distortion. The invention of the laser, which can produce high-power coherent optical
radiation at the transmitter, fueled the migration from RF/microwave communication to optical
communication. In fact, the rst patent on lasers (more precisely masers) by Nobel Laureates
Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, both OSA Honorary Members, was entitled Maser and
maser communication systems.
To make optical communication practical, however, the received optical power (not only the
transmitted power) must be much stronger than the noise. This requires a low loss optical
transmission channel. The loss in free-space transmission is determined by diffraction, which is
much larger than that of RF/microwave in appropriate cables. Fortunately, light can also be
guided by total internal reection, a phenomenon known since the mid-nineteenth century. An
optical ber with a high-index core surrounded by a lower-index cladding can support guided
modes inside the dielectric cylindrical waveguide that propagate without experiencing radiative loss [2]. As a consequence, the loss of the optical ber is dominated by material loss. Glass
bers were initially deemed impractical for communication systems, as the measured attenuation
was >1000 dB/km.
In 1966, Kao and Hockham showed that the measured losses were due to impurities rather
than fundamental loss mechanisms and, without impurities, glass bers could achieve losses
below 5 dB/km. They also identied that fused silica ber could have the lowest losses. OSA
Fellow Dr. Charles Kao was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking
achievements concerning the transmission of light in bers for optical communication, which
has fundamentally transformed the way we live our daily lives. It is the invention of the silica
optical ber and the semiconductor laser with signicantly long life that ushered in the era of
modern optical communication. (These inventions are described in separate essays in this section
of this book.)
The rst-generation ber-optic communication system in the 1980s used multimode
bers and 0.8-m multimode FabryPerot semiconductor diode lasers, supporting a data rate
209
of 45 Mbit/s [3], which was orders of

magnitude larger than that of the microwave cable systems then in use. Since then,
the capacity of optical ber communication systems has grown in leaps and
bounds. Throughout its history, ber-optic communication has invented and reinvented itself many times over, as shown in
Fig. 1, making terabits per second (Tb/s)
practical. For example, the second-generation ber-optic communication system
operated at 1310 nm using single-mode
bers and single-mode semiconductor diode lasers. This brought about two
improvements over the rst-generation
Fig. 1. History of ber-optic communication systems.
(Courtesy of Tingye Li, Alan Willner, and Herwing Kogelnik.)
systems. First, the 0.3-dB/km loss of optical ber at 1310 nm is much lower than
3 dB/km at 870 nm, which helped to overcome noise. Second, 1310 nm is the zero-dispersion wavelength for standard single-mode ber. All of
these different stages of technology development overcame different physical limitations of the optical
communication system, pushing capacity toward the Tb/s fundamental limit. The physical limitations
for ber-optic communication arise from noise and distortion.
First let us focus on the sources of noises, which are closely related to modulation formats. Before
1980, the modulation format for optical communication systems was intensity-modulation direct
detection, which is thermal noise limited with a sensitivity of thousands of photons/bit. In an effort to
overcome thermal noise, the third-generation optical communication systems moved to 1550 nm,
which is the minimum-loss wavelength for single-mode bers, to increase the received optical power. As
the additional power budget allowed gigabits-per-second transmission, distortions due to ber
dispersion could sometimes be the limiting factor. So in some third-generation systems, dispersionshifted bers for which the zero-dispersion wavelength was shifted to 1550 nm through proper design
of the ber index prole were used. In such systems, the capacity was still limited by thermal noise.
Thus, starting from the mid-1980s, the optical communications community embarked on the development of coherent detection. Phase-shift keying (PSK) using coherent homodyne detection is limited by
the shot noise of the local oscillator, and for binary PSK the sensitivity is 9 photons/bit, two orders of
magnitude better than the thermal noise limit. However, coherent optical communication did not
advance into commercial deployment because (1) phase locking and polarization management of the
local oscillator was too complex and unreliable, and (2) the advent of the erbium-doped ber amplier
(EDFA) made it unnecessary.
As early as 1964, rare-earth metal-doped glass ber was proposed and demonstrated as a gain
medium for optical amplication [4]. However, it was not until the late 1980s when two groups
published work demonstrating high-gain EDFAs for ber-optic communicationrst by the group led
by David Payne [5] and then by Emmanuel Desurvire [6]that EDFA revolutionized the eld of optical
communication. Payne and Desurvire received the John Tyndall Award from OSA in 1991 and 2007,
respectively. In terms of noise performance, optical pre-amplication (using an EDFA in front of the
photodetector) changes the dominant noise source to the amplied spontaneous emission of the EDFA
rather than the thermal noise of the photodetector. The fourth-generation optical communication
system employed pre-amplied direct detection, which has a sensitivity of 39 photons/bit. (An essay on
ber optical ampliers is in this section of this book.)
In fact, the gain bandwidth of an EDFA is 3 THz, much wider than the single-channel
bandwidth, which is limited by the speed of electronics. As a result, EDFAs enabled the fth
generation of wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) optical transmission systems. In these systems independent data streams are simultaneously transmitted on multiple wavelength channels in a
single ber and amplied together in a single EDFA, similar to frequency-division multiplexing in
210
radio communication. WDM systems, championed by Dr. Tingye Li, 1995 OSA President, provided a
multiplicative expansion of the ber-optic bandwidth and thus multiplicative growth in ber-optic
communication system capacity. The development of WDM systems, a major leap forward in optical
communication, began in the late 1990s.
Now let us focus on distortions in ber-optic communication. Chromatic dispersion and
polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) are linear distortions that exist in optical bers. With the
availability of EDFAs, optical power became an abundant resource that was extremely useful in
combating the effects of noise. But high optical power also introduced nonlinear distortions in
optical ber that do not have analogies in radio communication. This is because optical bers exhibit
an intensity-dependent refractive index called the Kerr nonlinearity. Kerr nonlinearity leads to selfphase modulation and intensity-dependent spectral broadening, which in conjunction with dispersion ultimately leads to amplitude noise and timing jitter. In addition, for WDM systems Kerr
nonlinearity also manifests itself in cross-phase modulation and four-wave mixing (FWM). Fourwave mixing requires phase matching of the four waves or momentum conservation of the four
photons. As a result, FWM is very strong in dispersion-shifted ber and can be effectively suppressed
in bers with a small amount of dispersion. For WDM systems, FMW is a dominant nonlinear
distortion. Therefore, WDM systems must have dispersion to avoid strong nonlinearity. But
dispersion is detrimental because it introduces linear distortion. The solution to this dilemma is
the dispersion- and nonlinearity-managed WDM system consisting of bers with positive dispersion
and negative dispersion in cascade. And because local chromatic dispersion is never zero, nonlinear
distortions are suppressed. As a result, the net overall chromatic dispersion is zero, so there is no
linear distortion. Dispersion- and nonlinearity-managed WDM systems account for the majority of
undersea systems all over the world. Dr. Andrew Chraplyvy and Robert Thack received the John
Tyndall Award from the OSA in 2003 and 2008, respectively, for their contribution to the
fundamental understanding of linear and nonlinear distortions.
After the turn of the new millennium, coherent optical communication made a comeback. This
was made possible by advances in digital signal processing (DSP) and large-scale applicationspecic integrated circuits. In sixth-generation digital coherent optical communication, hardware
phase locking and polarization management in conventional coherent optical communication of the
1980s were replaced by digital phase estimation and electronic polarization demultiplexing using
multiple-inputmultiple-output techniques. On the surface, it may seem incremental to migrate into
coherent optical communication when the improvement in sensitivity is rather limited and the price
to pay is the complicated DSP. The answer lies in the fact that DSP can perform not only phase and
polarization management but also a number of other functionalities better than or impossible for
optics in WDM systems. First, digital coherent communication enables electronic compensation of
all linear distortions/impairments, including chromatic dispersion, PMD, and non-ideal frequency
response of all components in the transmitter and receiver. Electronic dispersion compensation
eliminates the need for dispersion-compensation bers (DCFs), which leads to even less nonlinearity
considering that DCFs have a small effective area and fewer ampliers, and thus reduced noise.
Reduction in both nonlinear distortions and noises improves system performance. Theoretically, it
is even possible to use DSP to compensate nonlinear distortions. Digital coherent optical communication truly brought current ber-optic systems to the fundamental capacity limit, the so-called
nonlinear Shannon limit, of the single-mode ber.
Fueled by emerging bandwidth-hungry applications and the increase in computer processing power
that follows Moores law, internet trafc has sustained exponential growth. This trend is expected to
continue for the foreseeable future. As todays dense (D)WDM optical communication technology has
already taken advantage of all degrees of freedom of a lightwave in a single-mode ber, namely,
frequency, polarization, amplitude, and phase, further multiplicative growth has to explore new degrees
of freedom. Since the 2010 Optical Fiber Communications Conference, mode-division multiplexing in
which every mode in a multimode ber transmits independent information has emerged as a promising
candidate for the next multiplicative capacity growth for optical communication. Sufce it to say that
innovations for petabits-per-second (Pb/s) ber-optic communication will continue in the foreseeable
future.
211
References
1. R. Kompfner, Optical communications, Science 150, 149155 (1965).
2. D. Hondros and P. Debye, Elektromagnetische Wellen an dielektrischen Draehten, Ann. Phys. 32,
465 (1910).
3. T. Li, Advances in optical ber communications: an historical perspective, IEEE J. Sel. Areas
Communic. 1, 356372 (1983).
4. C. J. Koester and E. Snitzer, Amplication in a ber laser, Appl. Opt. 3, 11821186 (1964).
5. R. J. Mears, L. Reekie, I. M. Jauncey, and D. N. Payne, Low-noise erbium-doped bre amplier
operating at 1.54 m, Electron. Lett. 23, 10261028 (1987).
6. E. Desurvire, J. R. Simpson, and P. C. Becker, High-gain erbium-doped travelling-wave ber
amplier, Opt. Lett. 12, 888890 (1987).
212
19751990

G. H. C. New and J. W. Haus
he recent ftieth anniversary celebrations marking the invention of the laser and
the birth of modern nonlinear optics were major historical milestones. Theodore
Maimans observation of laser action in ruby in May 1960 [1] provided the essential
tool that enabled Peter Frankens team at the University of Michigan to perform their
legendary 1961 experiment in which they saw optical second harmonic generation for the
rst time [2]. From this small beginning, nonlinear optics has grown into the vast and vibrant
eld that it is today.
The Optical Society Centennial provides an opportunity to reect on developments in
nonlinear optics in the intervening years and, specically, to focus on some of the highlights in the
development of the eld between 1975 and 1990. The theoretical foundations of optical
frequency mixing were laid by Nicolaas Bloembergens Harvard team in a seminal 1962 paper
[3], which was prescient for introducing innovative ideas that strongly inuenced later developments in the eld; some specic examples will be mentioned later. In 1979, Nicolaas
Bloembergen (see Fig. 1) was awarded The Optical Societys Ives Medal, the societys highest
award. He won a quarter share of the 1981 Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development
of laser spectroscopy, in addition to his pioneering work on nonlinear optics.
By the early 1970s, many of the conceptual foundations of nonlinear optics had been laid,
and a remarkable number of crude experimental demonstrations of techniques that are now
routine had been performed. Progress over the ensuing decades was often prompted by advances
in laser technology and, crucially, in materials fabrication. Suddenly it would become possible to
implement an experiment so much more effectively than previously that it would soon become an
established laboratory technique, or might even form the basis of a new commercial product.
A major achievement of the period was the fabrication of layered crystalline structures in
which phase-matching is determined by the periodicity of the layers. Remarkably, this quasiphase-matching (QPM) technique was originally suggested in the 1962 Harvard paper
mentioned earlier [3], and it is a prime example of a principle that took more than two decades
of gestation between original inspiration and nal fruition.
Quasi-phase-matching materials have periodically reversed domains, each one coherence
length thick. The nished product is like a loaf of sliced bread in which alternate slices (of
anisotropic crystal) are inverted (see Fig. 2). The problem is that each slice has to be only a few
micrometers thick, so it would be a little thin for ones breakfast toast! It took more than two
decades to develop the sophisticated crystal growth techniques needed to fabricate media with
such thin layers. Today, QPM is routine; indeed many researchers have abandoned traditional
birefringent phase-matching altogether. The most well-known QPM medium is perhaps periodically poled lithium niobate (abbreviated PPLN and pronounced piplin), and practical devices
of high conversion efciency are commercially available. In 1998, Robert Byer (see Fig. 1) and
Martin Fejer were awarded The Optical Societys R. W. Wood Prize for seminal contributions
to quasi-phase matching and its application to nonlinear optics. More recently, in 2009, Robert
Byer received the Ives Medal, The Optical Societys most prestigious award.
The need for tunable coherent light sources to replace tunable dye lasers drove the
development of solid-state devices; these are not subject to messy chemical spills, and the tuning
ranges achievable in a single medium can extend from the ultraviolet to the mid-wave infrared
(35-m) regimes.
213
Fig. 1.
Images of ve scientists who have made major breakthroughs in the development of nonlinear optics.
From top left to bottom right they are: Nicolaas Bloembergen, Robert L. Byer, Chuangtian Chen, Linn F. Mollenauer,
and Stephen E. Harris. (Bloembergen, Mollenauer, and Harris photographs courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual
Archives, Physics Today Collection; Byer photograph courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, Gallery of
Member Society Presidents; Chen photograph courtesy of Professor Chen Chuangtian.)
An important nonlinear optical process for creating a wideband coherent light source is optical
parametric generation. This is essentially sum-frequency generation (the generalized version of second
harmonic generation) running in reverse. A high-frequency pump wave drives two waves of lower
frequency, known as the signal and the idler; in photon language, the pump photon divides its
energy between the signal and idler photons. Without a seed to dene a particular frequency band, the
signal and idler grow from noise, with frequencies determined by the phase-matching conditions. An
optical parametric amplier is a device of this kind with a signal or idler seed to x the operating
frequency. If the gain is high, the conversion efciency can be quite large, even for a single-pass system.
However, the efciency can be greatly improved by placing the nonlinear medium within a welldesigned cavity, creating an optical parametric oscillator (or OPO).
The rst OPO was demonstrated by Giordmaine and Miller as early as 1965, but subsequent
progress was slow, largely because nonlinear crystals of the necessary high quality were not available.
Indeed, the OPO is another example of a device where technological capability lagged seriously behind
214
concept. By the late 1980s, however, the introduction of new nonlinear materials coupled with progress in laser technology made it possible to realize
low-threshold OPOs. Synchronous pumping can be
employed, in which case the OPO is driven by a
train of short pulses with the repetition rate matched
to the round-trip time of the cavity. OPOs are now
standard devices in the well-found laser lab.
A number of new nonlinear materials that are
now household names were developed in the 1980s.
Using theoretical tools as a guide, C.-T. Chen
(see Fig. 1) and co-workers discovered nonlinear
materials such as BaB2O4 (beta barium borate, or
BBO) and LiB3O5 (lithium borate, or LBO), both of
which are widely used today. Other materials stud Fig. 2. SEM image of a periodically poled lithium
ied since that time include orientational-patterned
niobate wafer. (Reproduced with permission from [4].
Copyright 1990, AIP Publishing LLC.)
III-V semiconductors, ZGP (zinc germanium phosphide) and DAST (4-dimethylamino-N-methyl4-stilbazolium). Using a range of different nonlinear optical interactions, these have played an
increasingly important role in extending the range of tunable coherent sources to the long-wave infrared
(812 m) and beyond to the terahertz regime. In recognition of the central role of materials technology,
The Optical Society sponsored a 1988 conference entitled Nonlinear Optical Properties of Materials,
and key results were published in a special issue of the Journal of The Optical Society of America B [5].
The nonlinear interactions mentioned so far are all second order, which also means that they
involve the interaction of three waves. Third-order processes lead to a wide range of four-wave
phenomena, which include third harmonic generation, self-phase modulation via the optical Kerr effect
(nonlinear refraction), optical phase conjugation, and optical bistability, to name just a few. They also
form the basis of much of nonlinear spectroscopy, and quantum optical effects too.
Many important applications are based on nonlinear refraction. In combination with diffraction, it is
the essential ingredient in the formation of spatial solitons, while with group velocity dispersion, it is crucial
in the control of temporal pulse proles. The 1970s and 1980s saw rapid progress in the understanding of
optical pulse propagation and the development of nonlinear pulse compression techniques. Most of the
techniques involve judicious combinations of self-phase modulation (SPM) and group velocity dispersion
(GVD). Both of these processes cause a pulse to acquire a carrier frequency sweep (or chirp),
but the overall effect depends on whether the two processes work with or against each other and whether
they occur simultaneously or in succession. If they act simultaneously and in opposition, pulse propagation
is governed by the nonlinear Schrdinger equation, which supports optical solitons.
In the early 1970s, Hasegawa and Tappert had suggested that optical bers offered the ideal
environment for solitons, but it was not until 1980 that Mollenauer, Stolen, and Gordon at what was
then still Bell Telephone Labs actually observed optical soliton propagation in a ber. Later, in 1988,
Mollenauer and Smith demonstrated the transmission of 55-ps pulses over 400 km by supplying Raman
gain at 42-km intervals. The possible use of solitons in optical communications was vigorously pursued
in the 1990s but has rarely been implemented commercially. Nevertheless, research on solitons (both
temporal and spatial) had a signicant impact on nonlinear optics and indeed on laser technology as
well. Linn Mollenauer (see Fig. 1) was awarded The Optical Societys Charles Hard Townes award in
1997 for his work on optical solitons and their applications to data transmission. Earlier, in 1982, he
had received the R. W. Wood Prize for his work on color-center lasers, which played a vital role in early
soliton experiments.
The race to achieve ever shorter optical pulses began on the day Maiman demonstrated the rst laser
and is likely to run for as long as laser research continues. Its hallmark has always been the strong and
highly productive synergy between nonlinear optics and laser development. On the one hand, nonlinear
interactions are strengthened by the high peak power of short laser pulses, but nonlinear optical processes
are themselves exploited in advanced laser systems to promote the generation of shorter pulses.
215
The basic principle of pulse compression

involves the application of SPM and GVD in opposition (as for solitons), but in succession rather than
simultaneously. The idea, which originated in the
late 1960s, is to start by imposing SPM to broaden
the pulse spectrum and create the bandwidth required to support a shorter pulse. The wideband
signal is then compressed by using a dispersive delay
line, usually based on a pair of diffraction gratings
in a Z-shaped conguration, which has a similar
effect to that of negative GVD. An attractive option
is to introduce the SPM in an optical ber since, for
non-trivial reasons, the simultaneous effect of SPM
Fig. 3. Eighty times compression of a pulse.
and positive GVD produces stretched proles that
(Reproduced with permission from [6]. Copyright 1984,
are ideal for efcient compression.
AIP Publishing LLC.)
Fiber-grating compressors were rst
demonstrated in 1981, and there followed
a series of record-breaking experiments that
included the remarkable 1984 demonstration by Johnson, Stolen, and Simpson of a
compression factor of 80 (from 33 ps to
410 fs, Fig. 3). The culmination of this
effort was the famous achievement of a
6-fs pulse by Fork, Shank, and Ippen in
1987, a result that held the world record for
the shortest optical pulse for many years
thereafter.
Fig. 4. Supercontinuum generation using a prism to disperse
the colors in the pulse. (Image courtesy of [7]. 2008 SPIE,
Other important nonlinear effects ocimage credit: E. Goulielmakis, reprint_permission@spie.org.)
cur when pulses are launched in a ber.
Under suitable conditions, the combination of SPM and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) creates a signal that extends over more than
an octave in frequency bandwidth. A broadband signal of this kind is called a supercontinuum and has
valuable applications in metrology and spectroscopy (Fig. 4).
Most developments in nonlinear optics in the 1960s involved solid media, especially crystals,
although liquids also featured in experiments on the optical Kerr effect. By contrast, the 1970s and
1980s saw the beginning of work on the nonlinear optics of atoms and molecules in the gas phase that
would come to full fruition in the 1990s and 2000s in effects such as high harmonic generation (Fig. 5),
attosecond pulse generation, electromagnetically induced transparency, and slow light.
The early work on third harmonic generation in the inert gases in the late 1960s, and experiments
on third, fth, and seventh harmonic generation in metal vapors in the 1970s by Harris, Reintjes, and
others, all exhibited characteristics typical of the perturbative (weak-eld) regime, insofar as the
conversion efciency for higher harmonics fell away sharply. The rst steps on the road that would later
lead to the gateway into high harmonic generation were taken in the late 1980s. By that time, laser
intensities of ~100 TW/cm2 and above were becoming available, and some remarkable results on the
inert gases were recorded that marked the entry into a new strong-eld regime. For the lower harmonics
(up to perhaps the ninth), the conversion efciency dropped off as before, but higher harmonics lay on a
plateau on which the efciency remained essentially constant up to a well-dened high-frequency limit.
The cut-off point could be extended further into the UV by increasing the laser intensity, although a
saturation intensity existed beyond which no further extension was possible. These experiments laid the
foundation for work in the following decade in which harmonics in the hundreds and even the
thousands were generated.
An equally dramatic line of development involved atomic systems in which the main action
involved three levels linked by two separate laser elds. A number of different effects of this kind were
216
beginning to be studied in early 1980s,

most of which exploited the effect of quantum interference in one way or another.
Early examples included coherent population trapping and laser-induced continuum
structure, both of which were pregured to
some degree in the much earlier work of
Fano and others on Fano interference.
In the mid to late 1980s, the effect of
lasing without inversion (LWI) caused a
particular stir, probably because it contra Fig. 5. Experimental manifestation of high harmonic
generation. (Courtesy of [8]. Copyright 2011, Cambridge
dicted a principle that most people
University Press.)
regarded as fundamental to laser physics,
namely, that population inversion was an
essential prerequisite of laser action. The scheme for LWI envisaged by Harris involved three levels in a
pattern roughly resembling an inverted V, or a capital Greek lambda . Under normal circumstances,
laser amplication on one arm of the would occur only if a population inversion existed between the
two levels. Crucially, however, this restriction is removed if a strong laser eld is tuned to the resonance
frequency of the other arm of the .
The simplest explanation of how LWI works involves another quantum interference process,
highlighted by Harris in 1990, called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). A straightforward density matrix calculation shows that the absorption and dispersion characteristics of one of the
transitions of the are dramatically altered in the presence of the strong coupling eld tuned to the
other, and indeed that the absorption goes to zero on exact resonance. Quantum interference has in
effect canceled out the absorption process that normally competes with stimulated emission, thereby
enabling lasing to occur in the absence of a population inversion.
Stephen Harris (See Fig. 1) received the Ives Medal in 1991 for his pioneering work in nonlinear
optics. The citation specically mentioned his work on LWI and EIT.
Given the strict word limit that we have worked within, we have naturally been forced to be highly
selective in choosing the topics to cover. Literally thousands of research papers on nonlinear optics
presenting the work of many hundreds of researchers were written within the time frame covered in this
chapter. In view of these numbers, it is inevitable that many people will consider topics we have left out
to be more important than those we have included. We extend our apologies to the majority whose
work it has not been possible to mention here.
References
1. T. Maiman, Stimulated optical radiation in ruby, Nature 187, 493494 (1960).
2. P. A. Franken, A. E. Hill, C. W. Peters, and G. Weinreich, Generation of optical harmonics, Phys. Rev.
Lett. 7, 118119 (1961).
3. J. A. Armstrong, N. Bloembergen, J. Ducuing, and P. S. Pershan, Interactions between light waves in a
nonlinear dielectric, Phys. Rev. 127, 19181939 (1962).
4. G. A. Magel, M. M. Fejer, and R. L. Byer, Quasiphasematched secondharmonic generation of blue
light in periodically poled LiNbO3, Appl. Phys. Lett. 56, 108110 (1990).
5. C. M. Bowden and J. W. Haus, eds., Nonlinear optical properties of materials, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 6
(April 1989).
6. A. M. Johnson, R. H. Stolen, and W. M. Simpson, 80 singlestage compression of frequency doubled
Nd:yttrium aluminum garnet laser pulses, Appl. Phys. Lett. 44, 729731 (1984).
7. J. Hewett, Ultrashort pulses create ultrabroad source, historical archive, Optics.org.
8. J. W. G. Tisch, Imperial College Attosecond Laboratory; reproduced from G. H. C. New, Introduction
to nonlinear optics, Cambridge University Press 2011, with permission.
217
19751990
Linear and Nonlinear Laser

Spectroscopy
M. Bass and S. C. Rand
pectroscopy has been a fundamental part of optics ever since Newton rst showed that
white light could be dispersed into its constituent colors and later when Young showed that
light was wavelike and provided a grating with which to measure its wavelength. The role
of The Optical Society (OSA) in spectroscopy during the pre-laser era is described in an essay
entitled Spectroscopy from 1916 to 1940 in an earlier part of this book. The rst experimental
demonstration of a laser, a ruby laser, was made by Theodore Maiman in 1960, and soon after,
in 1964, a Nobel Prize was awarded for prior theory on the topic to Charles Townes, Nikolay
Basov, and Alexander Prokhorov. Additionally, parametric nonlinear optics was discovered by
Peter Franken in 1961. The combination of lasers and nonlinear optics made possible incredible
advances in spectroscopy leading to linear and nonlinear laser spectroscopy. Developments in
this eld were so numerous that this short account can only hope to capture the principal events
of an important chapter in optics and OSA history.
Almost immediately upon the invention of the laser, scientists recognized that the two most
obvious features of laser light, its high intensity and its spectral purity, were far beyond anything
that had been available before. In less than a year following Maimans ruby laser, Franken took
advantage of its high intensity to demonstrate optical second harmonic generation and open up
the eld of nonlinear optics. This would lead to numerous nonlinear spectroscopies mentioned
below. Different designs also permitted wide-ranging variations in the type of output obtainable
from lasers. Very pure single-frequency light was created with continuous-wave lasers and very
broad, supercontinuum sources were created with ultrashort pulse lasers. The availability of
lasers with large or small bandwidths and short or long pulse durations enabled the development
of dozens of new and powerful approaches to precision optical measurements.
The Debut of Laser Spectroscopy

In 1960 the extraordinarily high intensity and short pulse duration available from the rst ruby
lasers ushered in a whole new era of experimentation in optical spectroscopy. The shift to laser
methodology was rapid. Consider that G. Dieke and H. Crosswhite published a landmark paper in
1963 on the spectroscopy of doubly and triply ionized rare earths. For emission experiments they
used pulsed discharges with currents in excess of kiloamperes together with photographic
emulsions. For absorption measurements they employed high-pressure mercury and xenon lamps.
Yet Diekes student, S. Porto, who had labored to record infrared spectra of molecular hydrogen
with the same apparatus only a few years earlier, was at that very moment pioneering the use of
lasers in revolutionary spectroscopic techniques at Bell Labs in Murray Hill. There, Porto and his
colleagues made the rst observations of scattering from F-centers and spin waves, and introduced
resonant Raman laser spectroscopy for the study of solids. Porto was a Fellow of OSA, and when
he returned to Campinas, Brazil, in 1974 he was also elected a Fellow of the Brazilian Academy of
Science. The seeds of a quiet revolution in optics had been sown as far away as Brazil. This can be
considered a key starting point in the internationalization of OSA as it heralded widespread
scientic exchange between the United States and many other countries.
218
Time-domain laser spectroscopy offered optical measurement capabilities on time scales that were six
orders of magnitude faster than stroboscopes. Pumpprobe experiments with picosecond pulses could
time-resolve the fastest luminescent processes and follow the pathways of rapid chemical reactions.
Dynamic grating spectroscopies soon lent sophistication to the dynamical processes that could be read out
from the interference patterns formed by intersecting beams in various systems. Processes that produced
no luminescence at all, such as energy transport among excited states in molecular crystals (coherent
exciton migration), began to be investigated using transient grating approaches.
The realization that all systems possessed nite third-order susceptibilities and could easily be
phase-matched to yield intense signals led to widespread popularity of coherent four-wave-mixing
spectroscopy. Degenerate four-wave mixing in a counterpropagating pump geometry came into vogue.
Another approach was coherent anti-Stokes Raman (CARS) spectroscopy devised by P. Maker and
R. Terhune. This and other coherent spectroscopies not only achieved high resolution but gave signal
waves that conveniently emerged from the sample as beams. As a consequence they are still used today
to study molecular dynamics in chemistry.
Monochromaticity, wavelength control, and frequency stabilization improved steadily throughout
the late 1960s. Barger and Hall reported a versatile frequency-offset locking technique in 1969 that
permitted the frequency of one laser to be tuned relative to that of a second laser locked to a saturated
absorption feature of methane that was a candidate for an absolute frequency reference. Their
experiment demonstrated tunable control over the frequency of light to a precision of 1 kHz for
periods as long as an hour. For the rst time this hinted at the possibility of frequency references and
clocks based on optical schemes rather than radio frequency sources.
Optical modulation spectroscopies yielded still other measurement tools. When more than one
transition of an atom was excited by a coherent optical pulse, excited-state ne or hyperne structure
produced modulation effects in the emission known as quantum beats. At Columbia, D. Grischkowsky
and S. Hartmann extracted frequency-domain splittings from time-domain photon echo signals in
rare-earth-doped solids by simply Fourier transforming their data. This resolved the excited-state
hyperne structure with sub-megahertz precision and provided a beautiful example of the reciprocity
between time- and frequency-domain measurements. In atomic spectroscopy the method of quantum
beats also proved to be effective in resolving extremely ne splittings of energy levels in atomic vapors.
Gradual improvements in laser frequency control and methods of locking lasers together had the
effect of encouraging researchers to think that the use of more than one laser in an experiment might
eventually become possible, or even routine. The idea still seemed futuristic in 1972, so it came as quite
a shock when the speed of light was redened that year in a remarkable experiment by K. Evenson and
his colleagues, who determined the speed of light to ten signicant gures with an entire room full of
frequency-locked lasers.
Following this, H. Dehmelt trapped ions in free space at the University of Washington, a feat for
which he and W. Paul would share the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics. A. Ashkin (see Fig. 1) at Bell Labs,
and P. Toschek and H. Walther in Germany were thinking of ways to trap and cool individual neutral
atoms. W. E. Moerner reported that single, isolated centers could be interrogated spectroscopically even
in the complex environment of solids. The eld of spectroscopy was poised to take on the challenges of
laser cooling, BoseEinstein condensation (BEC), single-molecule spectroscopy, and the control of
trapped atoms for quantum information science.
Nonlinear Optics and Nonlinear Spectroscopy

A year after the (future OSA president) Peter Franken announced the experimental discovery of
nonlinear optics at the University of Michigan in 1961, M. Bass observed sum frequency
generation and then optical rectication. OSA meetings buzzed with the anticipation of additional
possible discoveries of nonlinear phenomena. A general analysis of nonlinear interactions was
published in September of 1962 by J. A. Armstrong and his colleagues. It indicated that an
enormous number of nonlinear effects were possible at high laser intensities, and reports of
experiments by other groups began to pour in. Nonlinear optics provided spectroscopists with
219
Fig. 1.
Arthur Ashkin. (AIP Emilio Segre Visual

Fig. 2. Theodor Hnsch. ( OSA. Photo courtesy

of Dr. W. John Tomlinson, Princeton, New Jersey.)
220
tools to reach otherwise inaccessible wavelengths, inaccessible spectral resolution, and

unimagined short pulse durations.
The push for better resolution took a leap
forward with the introduction of Doppler-free
laser spectroscopy. C. Borde, T. W. Hnsch, A. L.
Schawlow, V. Chebotayev, and V. Letokhov moved
forward quickly to investigate its implications in
Paris, Stanford, and Novosibirsk. It was widely
recognized that spectral broadening due to motion
of the atoms in a gas could be eliminated using a
variety of methods: saturation spectroscopy, or
2-photon absorption, or by trapping atoms. The
anticipated improvement in resolution from 104 to
1011 using relatively simple experimental techniques was substantial enough that optical Lamb shift
measurements could provide stringent tests of quantum electrodynamics. By 1975, research at Stanford
based on 2-photon Doppler-free spectroscopy of
hydrogen yielded a determination of the 1S Lamb
shift for the rst time. A concerted effort began to
improve measurements of the Rydberg constant. At
the time, the Rydberg constant was one of the most
poorly determined fundamental quantities. In the
decades that followed, its precision would improve
a millionfold.
In 1977 the next tool for precision spectroscopy
was introduced when the Ramsey fringe method
was adapted for high resolution optical spectroscopy in Russia and in the U.S. This succeeded in
extending the separated eld technique from microwave to optical frequencies, for which Norman
Ramsey received the 1989 Nobel Prize.
T. Hnsch (see Fig. 2) and A. Schawlow proposed a technique to stop atoms in order to improve
spectroscopic resolution using laser radiation tuned
below resonance. Their 1975 paper galvanized the
spectroscopic community focused on precise frequency measurements. That same year laser spectroscopy on trapped barium ions was proposed, and
by 1980 collaboration between Dehmelt and
Toschek had succeeded in trapping a single Ba+ ion
in a quadrapole trap, cooling it to 10 mK with light,
and observing its resonance uorescence. Dopplerfree spectroscopy of single Ba and Mg ions was on
the horizon, and optical clock transitions became
a topic of discussion. In 1982 H. Metcalf cooled a
beam of neutral sodium atoms with a Zeeman
slower, and the next year D. Pritchard suggested
a magnetic geometry to trap atoms. In 1985 S. Chu
(see Fig. 3) reported an all-optical trap dubbed
optical molasses and jointly with the MIT group
announced an efcient magneto-optic trap in 1987
that could rapidly cool a variety of atoms to milliKelvin temperatures. Then in 1988 P. Lett of W.
Phillipss group at NIST demonstrated cooling below the Doppler limit in alkali vapors. J. Dalibard
and C. Cohen-Tannoudji (see Fig. 4) at ENS
explained Letts mechanism in a widely read
1989 publication in the Journal of The Optical
Society of America B. Halfway around the world,
researchers in Japan were in close pursuit, applying
these advances to laser cooling of noble gases.
In 1995 these activities, originally motivated to
improve spectroscopic resolution, culminated in
the creation of a new form of matter. E. Cornell
and C. Wieman observed BEC of Rb atoms at JILA
in Colorado. By this time A. Schawlow and
N. Bloembergen had shared the 1981 Nobel
Prize for advances in spectroscopy. Chu, CohenTannoudji, and Phillips were due to share this
honor in 1997 for laser cooling. For producing
and studying properties of BECs, Wieman,
Cornell, and Ketterle would receive the Prize in
2001. J. Hall (see Fig. 5) and T. Hnsch would earn
the Nobel prize in 2005 for the development of
frequency combs that enabled tests of the variation of the gravitational constant and frequency
references with uncertainties at the level of a few
parts in 1015.
Fig. 3. Steven Chu. (Courtesy of U.S. Department

of Energy.)
Laser Spectroscopy: An
Enabling Science
The transition from spectroscopic research in the
period 19602000 to its many applications had a
long gestation period. D. Auston disclosed a method
of generating single cycles of terahertz radiation in
the 1980s. However, applications such as imaging
through plastics and ceramics with terahertz waves
would not become routine until the beginning of the
twenty-rst century. Similarly, as early as 1980,
T. Heinz and Y. R. Shen found that second harmonic generation was allowed on the surfaces of
centro-symmetric media but forbidden in their interior. IBM exploited this interaction to inspect silicon
wafers for electronic circuits, but decades passed
before species-specic structural and dynamic studies became popular with chemists. By the 1990s,
experiments in the research groups of S. Harris and
B. P. Stoicheff had established that opaque materials
could be rendered transparent through quantum
interference. This had immediate impact on spectroscopy and the generation of short wavelength
Fig. 4. Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. (Photograph by

Studio Claude Despoisse, Paris, courtesy AIP Emilio
Segre Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.)
221
radiation via nonlinear mixing. Yet once again a

20-year interval would pass before Rohlsberger was
to achieve electromagnetically induced transparency
at x-ray wavelengths, thereby hinting at the prospect of nuclear quantum optics.
There are other striking examples of how technological outgrowths of the last 50 years of spectroscopy continue to enable new science topics. The
sub-Doppler laser cooling techniques of 1986 became tools for the edgling eld of quantum information. Only recently have they been applied to
demonstrate 14-qubit entanglement with Ca+ ions.
Despite the frenzied activity in laser cooling and
trapping that accompanied the race to achieve BEC,
a quarter of a century also passed between the
invention of optical tweezers by Ashkin for trapping particles and single cells and the studies of
single biomolecules by S. Chu and others.
The Future
Over its 100-year lifespan, The Optical Society has
been led by many accomplished scientists, many of
whom were spectroscopists. It is partly for this
reason that the society has been able to maintain a prominent role throughout an explosive period
of scientic history that relied on precise spectral tests of new theories. Spectroscopists contributed to
but also beneted from and were nurtured by the emphasis on fundamental science and the open,
relaxed style of the Society, where many disciplines intersect. The vibrancy of OSA has rested on
personal relationships fostered by the Society across ideological boundaries. OSA has followed a
tradition of internationalization that began long before globalization made it necessary. Past president
Art Schawlow understood how important international connections were for spectroscopy and science
in general. He knew that when it came time for visitors from China, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland
to return home, they would inevitably take home part of his magic recipe for having fun with great
science. They had learned that You dont need to know everything to do good research. You just have
to know one thing that isnt known, and of course you also had to be a spectroscopist! By sharing this
attitude, Art was a great ambassador for the eld of spectroscopy and for OSA itself. The rich history of
both, and his encouraging message, accumulated in the hearts of his students and visitors. Current and
future OSA members will sustain the unique strengths of the Society that account for its remarkable
spectroscopic legacy and its future contributions.
Fig. 5.
John Hall. (Courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre

Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.)
Acknowledgement
Photos were provided by S. Svanberg, J. Hecht, H. van Driel, and the OSA archives. The authors wish
to thank J. Eberley for a critical review.
222
19751990
Optical Trapping and Manipulation

of Small Particles by Laser
Light Pressure
Arthur Ashkin
he invention of the laser has made possible the use of radiation pressure to optically trap
and manipulate small particles. The particles can range in size from tens of micrometers
to individual atoms and molecules. Laser radiation pressure has also been used to cool
atoms to exceptionally low temperatures, enabling a new branch of atomic physics. See [1] for an
extensive summary of the many varieties of work done with laser radiation pressure.
Inspired by a long interest in radiation pressure, in 1969 the author focused a TEM00 mode
laser beam of about 30-m diameter on a 20-m transparent dielectric latex particle suspended in
water. Strong motion in the direction of the incident light was observed. If the particle was off
axis, at the edge of the beam, a strong gradient force component to the light force pulling the
particle into the high-intensity region on the axis was observed. The particle motion was closely
described by these two force components: one called the scattering force in the direction of the
incident light and the other the gradient force in the direction of the intensity gradient. With
these two components, and using two oppositely directed beams of equal intensity, it was
possible to devise a stable three-dimensional all-optical trap for conning small particles.
Particles moving about by Brownian motion that entered the fringes of the beam were drawn
into the beams, moved to the equilibrium point, and were stably trapped. If the axial gradient
force is made to exceed the scattering force, and this can be done, then a single-beam trap is
possible, as shown in Fig. 1.
Because this was the rst example of stable optical trapping, this discovery was submitted to
Physical Review Letters. Since single atoms are just small neutral particles and should behave
much as single dielectric spheres, it was postulated that trapping of single atoms and molecules
should also be possible. At Bell Labs, if one wanted to submit a paper to Physical Review Letters
one had to pass an internal review by the prestigious theoretical physics department to preserve
the Labs good name. So the author submitted a manuscript and it was rejected. Upon the
recommendation of his boss, Rudi Kompfner, the inventor of the traveling-wave tube, the paper
was resubmitted and was accepted with no problem [2]. A second theoretical paper was
submitted to Physical Review Letters in 1970 on acceleration, deceleration, and deection of
atomic beams by resonance radiation pressure [3]. This was followed by a number of experiments on optical traps for micrometer-size solid spheres or liquid drops demonstrating optical
levitation against gravity in air and as a function of pressure down to high vacuum and for
various beam convergence angles. By using optical levitation in conjunction with feedback
stabilization of the levitated particles position, it was possible to study the wavelength dependence of the optical levitation forces with dye lasers. A series of complex size-dependent
resonances were observed that were found to be in close agreement with MieDebye electromagnetic theory calculations. These results are probably the most exact conrmation of
Maxwells theory for light scattering by transparent dielectric spheres. The frequencies of these
resonances allow one to determine the particle size and index of refraction to six or seven
signicant gures. Using the position stabilization technique it was possible to perform a modern
223
version of the Millikan oil drop experiment for accurately determining the electric charge of a single electron.
Optical trapping of atomic vapors in
high vacuum is more difcult than trapping macroscopic particles. One needs
some form of damping for lling and
holding atoms in an optical trap. Work
was started in the early 1970s on accelerating, decelerating, and deecting atoms
Fig. 1. A single-beam optical trap for a high-index,
with applications such as velocity sorting
transparent sphere. The laser beam is tightly focused such
and isotope separation. T. Hnsch and
that the axial component of the gradient force exceeds the
A. Schawlow wrote an important early
scattering force. E0 is the equilibrium point at which the sphere
paper on optical cooling of atoms using
is trapped.
the Doppler shift in a six-beam geometry
for use in precision spectroscopy. They
did not consider the possibility of optical trapping. In Russia, V. S. Letokhov and V. G. Minogen did
experiments trying to stop sodium beams with chirped counterpropagating light beams, but failed.
They were intending to trap atoms in a trap tuned a half-linewidth below resonance where cooling is a
maximum. W. D. Phillips and H. W. Metcalf, inspired by Ashkins rst paper about atoms, also started
work on atom slowing. They soon realized that the slowing difculties experienced by Letokhov and
Minogen were due to optical pumping, and in 1982 they successfully used a beam-slowing method
based on a tapered magnetic eld to completely stop the beam at a nal temperature of about 0.1 K.
In 1978 Bjorkholm, Freeman, and the author carried out an experiment using tuning far from
resonance that demonstrated dramatic focusing and defocusing of an atomic beam caused by the optical
gradient forces [4] (Fig. 2). These striking results suggested that atom trapping would be possible if
proper cooling could be achieved. It was realized that optical heating of atoms was a problem in
achieving stable traps for cold atoms even for optimal tuning at a half-linewidth below resonance,
where the cooling rate is a maximum, due to saturation. However, it was shown that deep trapping
potentials were possible for two-beam traps and one-beam traps by tuning far-off resonance where
saturation is greatly reduced. Two papers by Ashkin and Gordon addressed the details of laser cooling
and heating and showed various ways of achieving adequate Doppler cooling.
In 1983 Steve Chu was transferred to our Holmdel Lab from the Murray Hill Lab. He was an
experienced atomic physicist, but he did not know much about trapping at the time. He became
interested and decided to join John Bjorkholm and the author in an attempt to trap atoms using lasers.
This was at a time when we had some new bosses who decided that atom trapping would not work, and
they tried unsuccessfully to discourage Bjorkholm and Chu from working with the author on this
project. In spite of this pressure, Chu was given a quick lesson in atom trapping, and an effort was made
to demonstrate the rst optical trap for atoms. The rst experiment was aimed at creating a collection of
Fig. 2. Experimental
demonstration of the focusing
and defocusing of an atomic
beam caused by the optical
gradient force. (a) Laser tuned
below resonance; atoms
attracted to high intensity
regions. (b) Laser tuned above
resonance; atoms repelled from
high intensity regions. (Redrawn
from A. Ashkin, [IEEE J. Sel.
Topics Quantum Electron. 6(6),
Nov./Dec., 2000.])
224
very cold atoms capable of being conned in the shallow atom traps. The experiment was based on the
theoretical ideas proposed by Hnsch and Schawlow, mentioned earlier, and it worked beautifully. It
provided a cloud of atoms having a temperature of about 240 K, as expected, which is ideal for
trapping. That cooling technique has become to be known as optical molasses. Now that it was
possible to generate cold atoms, Bjorkholm suggested trying a single-beam gradient trap in spite of its
small size. The trap worked awlessly, and shortly afterward, in December 1986, the work was
featured on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. Surprisingly, a new trapping proposal by
Dave Pritchard of MIT appeared in the same issue of Physical Review Letters as our trapping paper. It
was for a large-volume magneto-optic scattering-force trap rendered stable via a quadrupole Zeemanshifting magnetic eld. The magneto-optical trap (MOT) is a relatively deep trap and is easily lled
because of its large size. As later shown, it did not even require any atomic beam slowing.
Shortly after the atom trapping experiment, Chu left Bell Labs for Stanford and continued his atom
trapping work. At Bell Labs, Bjorkholm and Ashkin turned to other work. Use of MOT traps
dominated over dipole traps for atom work for about the next ten years. In 1997 the Nobel Prize
in Physics was awarded to Chu, Phillips, and Cohen-Tannoudji for cooling and trapping of atoms.
In the lab, with the help of Joe Dziedzic, the author started looking at the use of focused laser beams
as tweezers for the trapping and manipulation of Rayleigh particles. They made a surprising discovery
one morning when while examining a sample that had been kept in solution overnight. Wild scattering
was seen emanating from the focus of the trap. A joke was made about having caught some bugs. On
closer examination it turned out that that this had happened. Bacteria had contaminated the sample,
and they had fallen into the trap. The sample was placed under a microscope where the trapping could
be observed in detail. In fact, the trap could be maneuvered to chase, capture, and release fastswimming bacteria with green argon-ion laser light. If the laser power was turned up, opticution was
observed; that is, the cell exploded. It was found that infrared YAG laser power was very much less
damaging. Samples of E. coli bacteria obtained from Tets Yamane of Murray Hill were seen to
reproduce right in the trap. Internal-surgery was performed in which the location of organelles was
rearranged and the organelles were attached in new locations. The visco-elasticity of living cells
cytoplasm and the elasticity of internal membranes were also studied. This early work was the start of a
new, unexpected, and very important application of laser trapping. A Nobel Prize winner at Bell Labs
mentioned, amusingly in retrospect, that the author should not exaggerate by predicting that
trapping would someday be important for the biological sciences.
Meanwhile, work to better understand optical molasses cooling of atoms was carried out at NIST
and Stanford. Importantly, at NIST Phillips had made the surprising discovery of cooling to temperatures as low as 40 K in optical molasses. This was of great interest to those racing to achieve
BoseEinstein condensation (BEC) at very low temperatures and high densities. Anderson et al. won
this race in 1995 using evaporative cooling from a magnetic trap reaching a temperature of about
170 nK at a density of 21012 atoms/cm3 with a loss of evaporated atoms by a factor of 500 from an
original 107 atoms. Eric Cornell, Carl Weiman, and Wolfgang Ketterle received the 2001 Nobel Prize in
Physics for the experimental demonstration of BEC.
The Nobel Committee in their 1997 press releases Addendum B on additional material mainly
for physicists says To become really useful one needed a trap deeper than the focused laser beam trap
proposed by Letokhov and Ashkin and realized by Chu and coworkers in optical molasses experiments. On the contrary, far-off-resonance traps built according to Ashkins design are the traps used in
virtually every current BoseEinstein experiment.
The story of the application of tweezer traps to biophysics and the biological sciences is more
straightforward [57]. After the early work of the author on living cells, Ashkin and collaborators and
Steven Block with Howard Berg showed the usefulness of optical tweezers for studying single motor
molecules such as dynein, kinesin, and rotary agella motors. Block and his co-workers continue to
extend tweezer techniques to DNA replication and protein folding at even higher resolution (fractions
of an angstrom) and lower force levels using super-steady optically levitated low-noise traps held in a
helium gas environment.
Light-pressure forces are probably the smallest controllable and measurable forces in nature. Other
low-force techniques such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) have their unique features but cannot
225
function deep inside living cells, for example. Looking to the future, one expects the interesting work on
motors and protein folding to continue. Perhaps we will see optical tweezers serving as gravitational
wave detectors. Large improvements in atomic clocks have been made in the past using atomic fountain
techniques. Recently another breakthrough has been made using ultracold optical lattice clocks
approaching a stability of one part in 1018. This achievement in time keeping by NIST has many
potential applications.
The study of light is fundamental to physics. As such, one expects that applications of optical
trapping and manipulation of particles by laser light pressure will continue well into the future.
The importance of using lasers for the trapping and cooling of atoms has been recognized by a
number of prizes and awards, including the Nobel Prizes mentioned above. In addition, Arthur Ashkin
has been recognized for his work in that eld by The Optical Society (OSA) with the Charles H. Townes
award in 1988, with the Ives Medal/Quinn Award in 1998, and by being elected an Honorary Member
of OSA in 2010.
Many thanks to John Bjorkholm for his help in editing this essay.
References
1. A. Ashkin, Optical Trapping and Manipulation of Neutral Particles Using Lasers: A Reprint Volume
with Commentaries (World Scientic, 2006).
2. A. Ashkin, Acceleration and trapping of particles by radiation pressure, Phys. Rev. Lett. 24, 156159
(1970).
3. A. Ashkin and J. M. Dziedzic, Observation of resonances in the radiation pressure on dielectric
spheres, Phys. Rev. Lett. 38, 13511354 (1977).
4. J. E. Bjorkholm, R. R. Freeman, A. Ashkin, and D. B. Pearson, Observation of focusing of neutral
atoms by the dipole forces of resonance-radiation pressure, Phys. Rev. Lett. 41, 13611364 (1978).
5. K. C. Neuman and S. M. Block, Optical trapping, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 75, 27872809 (2004).
6. K. Dholakia, P. Reece, and M. Gu, Optical micromanipulation, Chem. Soc. Rev. 37, 4255 (2008).
7. D. G. Grier, A revolution in optical micromanipulation, Nature 424, 810816 (2003).
226
19751990
High-Power, Reliable Diode

Lasers and Arrays
Dan Botez
he long-lived diode lasers demonstrated at Bell Laboratories in 1977 produced only a

couple of milliwatts (mWs), good enough for ber-optical communications and later for
compact disc reading. Other applications, such as high-speed optical recording, required
quasi-continuous-wave (CW) powers in the 50100-mW range delivered reliably in a single
spatial mode.
Since the reliable power is closely related to the optical power density that can damage the
emitting facet, designs were needed for enlarging the laser spot size both transversely (i.e., in a
direction perpendicular to the plane of the grown layers) and laterally, while maintaining a
single spatial mode. In conventional double-heterojunction devices, for which single transverse
optical-mode operation is ensured, the main challenge was to create single-mode structures of
large lateral spot size. This was realized by introducing mode-dependent radiation losses in
so-called antiguided structures, in either the lateral or the transverse directions, on both sides of
the dened lateral waveguide. Laterally antiguided diode lasers [1] emitting single-mode peak
powers in the 5080-mW range at 20%50% duty cycle enabled RCA Laboratories in 1980 to
realize high-speed optical recording. At about the same time, Hitachi Central Research
Laboratory reported single-mode CW powers as high as 40 mW employing optimized
transversely antiguided double-heterojunction devices [2].
In 1980 a breakthrough occurred in high-power diode-laser design with the implementation
of the large-optical-cavity concept for increased spot size in the transverse direction [1]. These
structures provided transverse spot sizes about 60% larger than in double-heterojunction
devices, enabling record-high reliable powers [1]. As a result, the constricted double-heterojunction, large-optical-cavity laser became the most powerful single-mode commercially available diode laser between 1981 and 1986.
In the 1980s the maximum reliable CW power was only about 25% of the maximum
achievable power set by catastrophic optical-mirror damage. Mirror damage in diode lasers is
caused by thermal runaway at the mirror facets due to increased light absorption and nonradiative recombination with increased drive current [3]. Solutions to suppressing damage
required nonabsorbing regions at the mirror facets. As early as 1978 researchers from NEC
Laboratories showed that Zn diffusion provides nonabsorbing regions at the mirror facets. This
led to a fourfold increase in the maximum achievable CW output power. Then, in 1984
researchers from RCA Laboratories demonstrated mirror-damage suppression by creating, via a
single etch-and-regrowth cycle, two-dimensional (2D) waveguiding structures at the mirror
facets that were transparent to the laser light. Those devices [3] provided peak output powers
of 1.5 W, a fourfold increase over the highest previously reported. However, the early
nonabsorbing-mirror approaches were impractical to implement. It took over ve years before
practical nonabsorbing-mirror lasers were developed and became commercially available.
Around 1982, interest arose in replacing ashlamps with diode-laser arrays as pumps for
solid-state lasers. This drive picked up steam with the advent of quantum-well diode lasers
since much lower threshold currents could be achieved than in standard double-heterojunction
lasers. In early 1983 researchers from Xerox PARC reported very high (>2.5 W CW) CW
power quantum-well lasers with optimized facet coatings [3]. Thus, they achieved an eightfold
227
increase over the maximum CW power

reported from double-heterojunction
lasers due both to the use of quantum
wells and the use of low-reectivity dielectric facet coatings. The facet coatings
also prevented attack and erosion of the
cleaved facets in air, enhancing device
reliability [3]. By the mid-1980s largeaperture, high-power, reliable diodes
lasting at least 10,000 hours became commercially available [3] from Spectra Diode Laboratories Inc., a start-up company
spun off from Xerox PARC. Later that
decade, quantum-well laser optimization
employing a single, thin quantum well in
a large-optical-cavity connement structure resulted in front-facet, maximum
CW wall-plug efciency as high as 55%.
Quantum-well lasers turned out to offer
a solution for practical nonabsorbing-mirror
lasers. Researchers from the University of
Illlinois at Urbana discovered that impurity
diffusion causes lattice disordering of multiquantum-well structures, leading to structures of higher bandgap energy than the
energy of light generated in undisturbed
multi-quantum-well structures [4]. In 1986,
by using impurity-induced disordering, researchers from Xerox PARC and Spectra
Diode Laboratories achieved nonabsorbing Fig. 1. First diode-laser bar to emit 100-W CW power at room
mirror structures at the mirror facets [4].
temperature: (a) schematic representation, (b) CW output as a
This led to dramatic improvement in
function of drive current. (D. R. Scifres and H. H. Kung, Highmaximum CW power from large-aperture
power diode laser arrays and their reliability, Chap. 7 in Diode
devices and was reected in similar imLaser Arrays, D. Botez and D. R. Scifres, eds. [Cambridge
provements in the reliable CW power
University Press, 1994].)
output from single-mode devices. This
approach led in 1990 to the rst 100-mW CW commercially available single-mode diode laser. An
alternative nonabsorbing-mirror approach was developed at IBM Zurich Laboratories [3,4]. This
approach, called the E2 process, consisting of complete device-facet passivation via in situ bar cleaving
in ultrahigh vacuum and deposition of a proprietary facet-passivation layer, led to reliable operation of
single-mode AlGaAs lasers at 200-mW output power. Today these are the two main nonabsorbing-mirror
approaches for multi-watt, reliable operation of both single-stripe lasers and laser bars.
In the early 1990s single-stripe laser and laser-bar development for pumping solid-state lasers
started in earnest. For single-stripe, facet-passivated devices of ~400-m-wide aperture, Spectra Diode
Laboratories reported maximum CW power of 11.4 W with reliable CW power of ~4 W [3]. Monolithic
laser bars [Fig. 1(a)] composed of an array of 80 separate facet-passivated lasers emitted 100-W CW at
room temperature [Fig. 1(b)] [3]. Laser-bar operation in quasi-CW mode at low duty cycles allowed
effective heat removal; thus, permitting maximization of the energy per pulse and consequently quite
suitable for pumping solid-state lasers. Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories
(LLNL) reported highly stable high-peak-power, quasi-CW operation after 1 billion shots from 1-cmlong bars [4]. Laser bars were further stacked in 2D arrays to deliver the high powers needed for
effective solid-state-laser pumping. Heat removal was a challenging task, and several approaches were
developed [3,4]. At the time, the most efcient way to remove heat from 2D arrays was the silicon-based
228
micro-channel cooling technology developed at

LLNL [4]. Using that technology LLNL demonstrated
41-bar stacks delivering 3.75-kW peak power [4].
By the end of the decade steady development led to
signicantly improved performance.
Spectra Diode Laboratories was at the forefront
of commercializing high-power diode-laser bars.
Donald R. Scifres, the CEO of Spectra Diode Laboratories, was recognized by The OSA in 1996,
when he was the awarded the Edwin H. Land
Medal for his pioneering scientic and entrepreneurial contributions to the eld of high-power
semiconductor lasers (Fig. 2). A year later, Dr.
Scifres and his wife, Carol, endowed the OSA Nick
Holonyak, Jr. Award, dedicated to recognize individuals who have made signicant contributions to
optics based on semiconductor-based optical
devices and materials, including basic science and
technological applications.
In the mid-1990s two major developments led
to signicant increases in the output powers of
single-stripe diode lasers: the broad-waveguidedevice concept and the use of Al-free, activeregion structures. The broad-waveguide concept
for asymmetric and symmetric structures involved
Fig. 2. Donald R. Scifres, recipient of the 1996
a large-optical-cavity structure of large equivalent
Edwin Land Medal (at the time). (Courtesy of Dr. W.
(transverse) spot size as well as low internal cavity
John Tomlinson, Princeton, New Jersey.)
loss [5]. The total thickness of the
optical-connement layer of the broadwaveguide structure is quite large, while
making sure that lasing of high-order
transverse modes is suppressed via losses
to the metal contact [5]. Diodes capable
of over 10-W CW power were achieved
using active regions composed of Al-free,
indium (In)-containing material with relatively high mirror-damage power density (see Fig. 3). Later it became clear that
adding In to the active-region material
signicantly decreases the surface recombination velocity, which in turn increases
the mirror-damage power density [4].
Indium had another highly benecial effect with respect to laser-device reliabili Fig. 3. Light-current characteristics in CW and quasi-CW
operation for the rst single-stripe (100-m-wide aperture) diode
ty: it was found to suppress crystal-defect
laser to emit over 10-W CW power. (Reproduced with permission
propagation in GaAs-based lasers [4].
from A. Al-Muhanna, L. J. Mawst, D. Botez, D. Z. Garbuzov, R. U.
That is why currently the most reliable
Martinelli, and J. C. Connolly, High-power (>10 W) continuous0.81-m emitting devices have either
wave operation from 100-m-aperture 0.97-m-emitting Al-free
InGaAsP or InAlGaAs active regions.
diode lasers, Appl. Phys. Lett. 73(9), 1182 [1998].)
Another key issue that was tackled in
the mid-1990s was suppression of carrier leakage out of the lasers active regions. Since carrier leakage
is a thermally activated effect a substantial amount of it causes a signicant decrease in the laser slope
efciency as the heat-sink temperature increases. This decrease in slope efciency is characterized by a
229
temperature coefcient T1 [5]. When carrier leakage is suppressed via bandgap

engineering, the T1 parameter has a high
value, which reduces the active-region
heating [5] and increases the maximum
achievable CW power. A high T1 value
also leads to reduced mirror-facet heating;
thus, it results in high mirror-damage
power-density values [5] and subsequently
long-term reliable operation at high CW
power levels.
To minimize heating in diode lasers
and decrease the heat load as well as
improve the lasers reliability in CW
operation the value of the electrical-to Fig. 4. Light-current characteristics and wall-plug efciency
optical power conversion efciency, the
for the rst diode-laser bar to emit with over 70% CW wall-plug
so-called wall-plug efciency p needed to
efciency at room temperature. (Reproduced by permission of
be increased. In 1996, by using broadthe Institution of Engineering & Technology. Full acknowledgment
waveguide structures with suppressed
to M. Kanskar, T. Earles, T. J. Goodnough, E. Stiers, D. Botez,
and L. J. Mawst, 73% CW power conversion efciency at
carrier leakage [6], researchers at the Uni50 W from 970 nm diode laser bars, Electron. Lett. 41(5),
versity of WisconsinMadison achieved p
245247 [2005].)
as high as 66%. At the time it was noticed
that the devices could not reach their ultimate maximum p value due to a built-in voltage differential in the laser structure. Efforts to increase p
re-started in 2003. By 2005, reductions in the built-in voltage differential as well as laser-structure
optimization led to CW wall-plug efciencies of 73%75% for laser bars from Alfalight, Inc., nLight
Inc., and JDSU Corp. A typical result is shown in Fig. 4, which shows a 50-W CW output delivered with
73% wall-plug efciency, at 0.97 m from a 1-cm-wide laser bar [7]. The achievement of record-high
wall-plug efciency was quite a signicant development in that it led the typical p of commercial laser
bars to increase from ~45% to ~65%. Consequently, the dissipated heat that needed to be removed was
reduced by more than a factor of 2, which is very important since thermal load management drives the
packaged laser weight.
With the advent of the telecom bubble, feverish activity started around 1999 to create singlespatial-mode, high-power (~1-W CW) 0.98-m emitting diode lasers for use as pumps for erbiumdoped ber ampliers to be employed as signal boosters in long-distance ber-optical communications.
Although many complex and elegant approaches were tried, in the end, facet-passivated, 45-m-wide
conventional ridge-guide devices prevailed [8]. Even though single-spatial-mode CW powers as high as
1 W are achievable, reliability limits output to 0.7 W CW due to bulk degradation [8].
Attempts to achieve long-term, reliable operation at higher coherent CW powers by using unstable
resonator or master oscillatorpower amplier semiconductor-based congurations have failed [2, 9].
Other approaches consisted of incorporating periodic features, such as distributed-feedback gratings, in
the device structure to realize so-called photonic-crystal lasers. However, when using photonic-crystal
distributed-feedback devices, the induced periodic refractive-index steps are so small that they are
comparable to thermally induced index steps in quasi-CW or CW operation. In turn, these lasers
perform well only in low-duty-cycle (1%) pulsed operation; thus they are impractical since most
applications require high average powers. Only high-index-contrast photonic-crystal lasers that possess
long-range coupling between the photonic-crystal sites [2, 9] appear, at present, as the solution to
achieving multi-watt CW coherent power from monolithic semiconductor lasers. High-index-contrast,
long-range coupling photonic-crystal lasers were realized [9] as early as 1989 in the form of laterally
resonant, phase-locked arrays of antiguided lasers, so-called resonant-optical-waveguide arrays. The
lateral resonance feature ensures strong coupling between all array elements, in spite of large built-in
index steps [9]. In 1991 the resonant-optical-waveguide array became the rst diode laser to demonstrate
1-W peak power in a diffraction-limited beam [9], and in 1992 it was theoretically shown to be equivalent
230
to a lateral distributed-feedback structure for which

both index and gain vary periodically [9]: that is, an
active photonic-crystal laser structure. Thus, the
resonant-optical-waveguide array did constitute the
rst photonic-crystal laser developed for high-power,
single-mode operation from large-aperture semiconductor lasers. In 1999, resonant-optical-waveguide
arrays of an index step more than an order of magnitude larger than in photonic-crystal distributed-feedback structures demonstrated 1.6-W CW power [10]
in a nearly diffraction-limited beam from a 200-mwide aperture. In 2010, the OSA presented Dan Botez,
Philip Dunham Reed Professor at the University of
WisconsinMadison and co-founder of Alfalight Inc.,
the Nick Holonyak, Jr. Award for the achievement of
active photonic-crystal semiconductor-laser structures for high-coherent-power generation (Fig. 5).
High-power, reliable diode-laser technology
reached a high degree of maturity by about 2005.
Single-stripe devices with 10-W reliable output
power and wall-plug efciencies of ~65% are available from diode-laser manufacturers for various
applications including single-diode pumping of
solid-state lasers and ber lasers. Laser bars, used
Fig. 5. Dan Botez, recipient of the 2010 Nick
mostly for pumping solid-state lasers, are commerHolonyak, Jr. Award (at the time). (OPN June 2010
cially available with 200-W CW output powers,
Optical Society Awards.)
65% wall-plug efciency and are guaranteed to
operate for 30,000 hours. Future developments may involve the commercial realization of active
photonic-crystal lasers for watt-range coherent CW powers as well as the use of photonic-crystal
structures for emission of the generated light through the substrate (i.e., surface emission) for even
higher coherent powers delivered in a reliable fashion.
References
1. D. Botez, D. J. Channin, and M. Ettenberg, High-power single-mode AlGaAs laser diodes, Opt. Eng.
21(6), 216066 (1982).
2. N. W. Carlson, Monolithic Diode-Laser Arrays (Springer-Verlag, 1994).
3. D. R. Scifres and H. H. Kung, High-power diode laser arrays and their reliability, Chap. 7 in Diode
Laser Arrays, D. Botez and D. R. Scifres, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
4. R. Solarz, R. Beach, B. Bennett, B. Freitas, M. Emanuel, G. Albrecht, B. Comaskey, S. Sutton, and
W. Krupke, High-average-power semiconductor laser arrays and laser array packaging with an
emphasis on pumping solid state lasers, Chap. 6 in Diode Laser Arrays, D. Botez and D. R. Scifres, eds.
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).
5. D. Botez, Design considerations and analytical approximations for high continuous-wave power,
broad-waveguide diode lasers, Appl. Phys. Lett. 74(21), 31023104 (1999).
6. D. Botez, High-power Al-free coherent and incoherent diode lasers, Proc. SPIE 3628, 210 (1999).
7. M. Kanskar, T. Earles, T. J. Goodnough, E. Stiers, D. Botez, and L. J. Mawst, 73% CW power
conversion efciency at 50 W from 970 nm diode laser bars, Electron. Lett. 41(5), 245247 (2005).
8. G. Yang, G. M. Smith, M. K. Davis, D. A. S. Loeber, M. Hu, Chung-en Zah, and R. Bhat, Highly
reliable high-power 980-nm pump laser, IEEE Photon. Tech. Lett. 16(11), 24032405 (2004).
9. D. Botez, Monolithic phase-locked semiconductor laser arrays, Chap. 1 in Diode Laser Arrays,
D. Botez and D. R. Scifres, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
10. H. Yang, L. J. Mawst, and D. Botez, 1.6 W continuous-wave coherent power from large-index-step
(n0.1) near-resonant, antiguided diode laser arrays, Appl. Phys. Lett. 76(10), 12191221 (2000).
231
19751990
Tunable Solid State Lasers

Peter F. Moulton
hile the wavelength of any laser can be varied, lasers get classied as tunable when
their tuning range becomes a substantial fraction of their center wavelength.
Despite having lower optical gain than narrow-line rare-earth doped crystal
lasers such as Nd3+-doped YAG, tunable lasers are desirable for a number of reasons. In
laser-based spectroscopy, laser tuning allows one to access spectral features of interest, while
in laser propagation through the atmosphere, tuning can be used to avoid atmospheric
absorption lines. A large tuning range implies the ability to generate and amplify short
pulses of light. The development of practical and efcient tunable solid state lasers has led to
a scientic revolution and an emerging industrial revolution in laser processing of materials,
based on the generation of electromagnetic pulses with femtosecond and recently attosecond
duration.
Most broadly tunable lasers employ ions from the 3d portion of the periodic table.
Figure 1 presents so-called conguration-coordinate diagrams that help explain the broad
tunability of 3d ions. The diagrams are a greatly simplied schematic representation of the
combined energy of the laser-active ion and its environment as a function of the positions of the
atoms surrounding the ion. In equilibrium, the overall energy is minimized, and the system
energy increases as the coordinate deviates from the equilibrium position. Deviation occurs as a
result of the always present vibrations of the atoms, which appear even at the lowest temperatures from the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. The left-hand diagram shows the
case where, when the ion energy level changes from a ground state to an excited state, the
equilibrium position for the conguration coordinate is unchanged. The right-hand side shows
the case where the equilibrium position does change.
An important concept regarding the linewidth of the transitions between the ion ground and
excited states is the FranckCondon principle. Stated in classical terms, when an active ion
undergoes a transition, it occurs so quickly that the atomic surroundings do not move, as shown
by the vertical arrows in the diagrams. The left-hand diagram is representative of the type of
narrow-linewidth transitions among levels of the rare-earth ions, since changing the electronic
state of the spatially compact wavefunctions of the rare earths has negligible effect on the
surrounding atoms.
The electronic wavefunctions of 3d ions have a larger spatial extent than those of rare-earths
and have a stronger interaction with their environment. The case illustrated in the right-hand
diagram shows what happens with a strong interaction, exciting the electronic level leads to a
new equilibrium position. As is evident from the arrows, the energy associated with ground-toexcited-state transitions does vary with the displacement, leading to a large spread in energies
and hence a large linewidth. The energies for the absorption (ground-to-excited) transitions are
generally distinct and higher than those for emission and possible laser operation (excited-toground transitions). As a result, even with only two electronic transitions, one can observe fourlevel laser operation (as shown by the numbers in Fig. 1) as the peak absorption and emission
wavelengths do not overlap. These types of transitions are often referred to as vibronic, a
concatenation of vibrational and electronic.
After the demonstration of the ruby laser, and around the same time as the development of
rare-earth-doped lasers, there were demonstrations of the rst broadly tunable solid state lasers,
based on 3d-ion transitions. In particular, in 1963 L. F. Johnson and co-workers at Bell Labs
232
Fig. 1.
Congurationcoordinate diagrams for two

cases of paramagnetic-ion
transitions.
reported optical maser oscillation from Ni2+ in MgF2 involving simultaneous emission of phonons,
which, translated to now-accepted terminology, would be laser operation on vibronic transitions.
Subsequent work by the same group showed operation on vibronic transitions from Co2+ ion in MgF2
and ZnF2 around 17502150 nm, prism-based tuning, albeit in discontinuous segments from Ni:MgF2,
and operation from V2+-doped MgF2 around 1100 nm. The major drawback to these rst vibronic
lasers was that, because of thermally induced non-radiative processes, relatively low-threshold operation with lamp pumping required cooling of the laser crystals to cryogenic temperatures. The author,
working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the 1970s, became aware of the early Bell Labs work and
realized that the use of lasers, rather than lamps, as pump sources could greatly reduce the engineering
complexity of the systems. In particular, Nd-doped solid state lasers operating around 1300 nm proved
effective in pumping both Ni2+ and Co:MgF2 lasers. In the subsequent work, he had some success with
the Co:MgF2 laser, which proved capable of tuning from 16302080 nm at LN2 temperatures and
17502500 nm at room temperature. Other 3d systems he studied showed clear evidence of a problem
that has plagued many tunable solid state lasers: excited-state absorption (ESA). For most ions there are
a number of 3d levels above the rst excited state, i.e., the upper laser level. Depending on the positions
of the levels in the conguration-coordinate diagram, it is possible that, for the desired laser wavelength,
induced transitions to one or several of these levels may be possible. The net cross section that
determines the laser gain is the cross section for transitions to the lower laser level minus the cross
section for transitions to the higher-lying states, and this reduces laser efciency and can even prevent
laser operation.
The announcement of room-temperature, 750-nm-wavelength-region, tunable laser operation
from Cr3+-doped BeAl2O4 (alexandrite) in 1979 re-ignited interest in Cr3+-doped lasers beyond ruby.
At rst, laser operation was thought to be, like ruby, on a narrow-line transition but spectroscopic
investigation showed that it was in fact a vibronic. However, the gain in alexandrite lasers is relatively
low, limiting applications, and today the most widespread use of alexandrite is in lamp-pumped, longpulse lasers used for a variety of medical applications. The majority of other Cr3+-doped tunable
materials studied showed low conversion of pump to laser power, generally attributed to ESA. One
class (colquirite structure) of materials, rst developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
includes the crystals LiCaAlF6 (LiCAF) and LiSrAlF6 (LiSAF) and was shown to have relatively weak
ESA and thus high efciency. However, the thermo-mechanical properties of the colquirite host crystals
(with thermal conductivities 10%20% of the sapphire and alexandrite host crystals) signicantly limit
their ability to generate high average powers free of signicant thermo-optic distortion of the output
beam and, ultimately, free of fracture to the laser material.
While listening to a presentation on a particular type of color-center laser the author noted the
simplicity of that system: there were no excited states above the upper laser level that could cause
ESA. A subsequent review of the periodic table showed that one 3d ion, Ti3+, has only a single 3d
electron. The ve-fold degenerate free-space state for that electron placed in a typical crystal, to rst
order, splits into a three-fold degenerate ground state, 2T2, and a doubly degenerate upper state, 2E.
Any higher-lying states result from transitions that take the single electron out of the 3d shell and
233
Fig. 2.
Absorption (green)
and emission (red) cross
sections for Ti:sapphire and a
relative plot (dashed gray
curve) of the measured
uorescence spectrum. The
noise in the long-wavelength
region is from the detection
system.
could be so high in energy as to not create ESA. There were reports on the basic spectroscopy of
Ti3+-doped Al2O3 (Ti:sapphire) with data on absorption and uorescence. Given the superior thermomechanical properties of sapphire, proven with the ruby laser, it looked to be a good choice for a
Ti3+ host.
The author obtained crystal samples from Robert Cobles group at MIT, where they had been
studying the diffusion of oxygen in sapphire by using the oxidation state of Ti as a tracer. (Coble was
the developer of the rst transparent ceramics, paving the way for sodium arc lamps and, later, laserquality ceramics.) The authors measurements of the absorption cross section and uorescence spectra,
shown in Fig. 2, showed much broader emission than earlier reports. When one converts the emission
data to gain cross section (also plotted in Fig. 2), multiplying by the necessary (wavelength)5 correction,
the tuning range is unusually broad. The spectral breadth of the emission results, in part, from
JahnTeller splitting of both the ground and upper levels of the ion, leading to a more complicated
conguration coordinate than shown in Fig. 1, where both the ground and excited states have multipleenergy versus displacement curves. The author also determined the uorescence decay time and found a
room-temperature value of 3.15 s. The short lifetime seemed to indicate low quantum efciency, but if
one estimates the radiative value based on the strength of the measured absorption in the material, as
well as on optical gain measurements, one nds high quantum efciency, on the order of 80% at room
temperature. The short lifetime and associated high gain cross section (in the range 34 10-19 cm2)
result from the trigonal symmetry of the Ti3+ site in sapphire, which acts to strongly activate the dipoleforbidden 2E 2T2 transitions.
The author rst obtained laser operation from the material in May of 1982 and reported the results
in June at the Twelfth International Quantum Electronics Conference in Munich. There was a delay in
publication in a fully refereed journal until 1985 while the author worked, unsuccessfully, to patent the
system, became engaged in other technical work, and left MIT Lincoln Laboratory to help start a
company. The results published in 1985 included demonstrations of pulsed laser operation with lamppumped, dye-laser pumps, frequency-doubled, Q-switched, Nd:YAG laser pumps, and continuouswave (CW) operation with argon-ion-laser pumps, with cryogenic cooling used to obtain true-CW
operation. In laser operation, tuning experiments showed that the observed tuning range and that
predicted by uorescence measurements were in good agreement, conrming that ESA was not a factor
in laser operation.
The rst commercial Ti:sapphire laser product, an argon-ion-laser pumped CW device, was
introduced by Spectra-Physics in 1988 and was followed shortly after by one from the authors
company, Schwartz Electro-Optics, that included an option for a single-frequency, ring-laser conguration. Early applications of the products included use as a diode-laser substitute in the development of
234
other solid state lasers, notably Er-doped ber ampliers pumped at 980 nm for telecom applications
and later Yb-doped, high-efciency crystal lasers. With the discovery that nonlinear effects in the CW
Ti:sapphire laser crystal, namely Kerr-effect lensing, could lead to generation of 60-fs-duration pulses,
the utility of Ti:sapphire lasers greatly expanded. The irony of this is that the nonlinearity in the solid
state laser medium might have been expected to be a limit to the mode-locking properties of the system,
but it in fact provided a path to generation of femtosecond pulses. Subsequent technology improvements, including dispersion-compensating intracavity elements, broadband mirrors with appropriate
optical dispersion and phase characteristics, and sophisticated pulse diagnostics, led to direct generation
of 3.6-fs-duration pulses at 800 nm, slightly more than one optical cycle. These are claimed to be the
shortest pulses directly generated by any laser system and close to the limit expected from the 100-THz
gain bandwidth of Ti:sapphire. Commercial mode-locked Ti:sapphire lasers emerged in 1991 with
picosecond-duration pulses, followed shortly by Kerr-lens-based systems providing 100-fs-duration
pulses, and brought reliable ultrafast-laser technology to a broader base of users, replacing dye-laserbased sources that required long setup times with turn-key sources that allowed users to devote more
time to science and much less to laser maintenance. The high Ti:sapphire laser gain cross section yields a
pulse saturation uence on the order of 0.8 J/cm2, comparable with 0.7 J/cm2 of Nd:YAG-generated
high-energy pulses. If one uses a Q-switched, frequency-doubled, Nd:YAG solid state pump laser, the
Ti:sapphire medium will be able to integrate and store the pump energy, which must then be extracted
within a microsecond or so of the pump pulse.
The combination of femtosecond-duration pulses produced by CW Ti:sapphire lasers and highgain, high-energy ampliers pumped by pulsed, Q-switched lasers has led to widely used systems for
high-intensity pulse generation. A key technology for this combination is the chirped-pulse amplication (CPA) technique of Strickland and Mourou, rst reported in 1985 and nicely matched to the
properties of Ti:sapphire. With the availability of large-aperture Ti:sapphire crystals, the ultimate
limit on energy is set by the pump laser, and the limit on pulse rate is set by a combination of the pump
laser and thermal effects in the Ti:sapphire material. At present, regenerative systems are widely
available on a commercial basis, with pulse energies of tens of millijoules and pulsewidths <40 fs,
with cryogenic cooling used for systems producing 2030 W average power. In sum, commercial
sales of Ti:sapphire lasers to date, including associated green-wavelength pump lasers, are on the
order of $1 billion, not counting very-high-power systems installed or being built at major research
laboratories.
At this writing, there is active development to scale up the peak power/energy
of Ti:sapphire CPA systems. The highest
reported power is 2 1015 W (2 PW), from
a system in Shanghai, with a nal stage
pumped by a Nd:glass laser providing
140 J of 527 nm pump energy. The APPOLON Ti:sapphire laser system, under construction in France, has a goal of 10 PW in
a pulse of 150 J in 15 ps. Figure 3 shows
the pumped nal stage of the one the
Gemini ampliers at the Central Laser
Facility (CLF), Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxford, UK, generating 25 J of
pulse energy in a 30-fs pulse.
Key new advances in tunable solid
state lasers are now almost entirely driven
by their application to ultrafast pulse
Fig. 3. One of the two Gemini ampliers at Rutherford
generation and include diode-pumped,
Appleton Laboratory, showing, in the center, a green-laser-pumped
rare-earth, Yb-doped crystals that can genTi:sapphire crystal 90 mm in diameter and 25 mm thick. With 60 J of
erate pulses on the order of 100 fs, and
pump energy the system has generated 25 J of output energy in a
2+
Cr -doped ZnSe and similar II-VI
30 fs pulse. (STFC Gemini Laser Facility/Chris Hooker).
235
semiconductor hosts, providing high-gain operation similar to that of Ti:sapphire lasers but centered at
2500 nm. The longer wavelength is of great interest for attosecond pulse generation in the x-ray
wavelength region through high-harmonic generation. The limited number of pages for this article
requires that we leave out further discussion of these developments in tunable solid state lasers.
Other articles in this book provide details of the exciting science and Nobel-prize-winning work
that has been enabled by the development of tunable solid state lasers.
236
19751990
Erich P. Ippen
Introduction
A particularly remarkable aspect of lasers is their ability to emit shorter ashes (pulses) of light
than achievable with any other means. This ability has, over the years, advanced the
observation and measurement of events from the nanosecond timescale down to the picosecond (1012), femtosecond (1015), and even attosecond (1018) timescales. To use such pulses has
required the development of new methods for measuring and characterizing the pulses
themselves on ultrafast timescales beyond the reach of electronics. These methods have, in
turn, made it possible to study ultrafast phenomena in ways that produced completely new
insights into the evolution of such phenomena in physics, chemistry, and biology [1]. As
ultrashort-pulse laser technology has developed, its other characteristics such as the high peak
power and ultrabroad bandwidth packed into a short pulse have also found important
applications. The compression of even very modest amounts of pulse energy into femtosecond
durations produces sufciently high peak power for precision machining and micro-surgery
without unwanted damage and for nondestructive nonlinear methods of microscopy that
produce three-dimensional (3D) biological imaging with micrometer resolution. The ultrabroad bandwidths associated with femtosecond pulses have made possible 3D medical imaging
via optical coherence tomography (OCT), simultaneous creation of many wavelengthmultiplexed optical communication channels with only one source, and major advances in
precision spectroscopy and optical clocks [2,3].
The Optical Society (OSA) played a major role in supporting the eld, starting with its
creation of the rst International Conference on Picosecond Phenomena in 1978 (name changed
in 1984 to Ultrafast Phenomena to reect the emergence of femtosecond science and technology).
Held every two years since then (for the 19th time in 2014, the year of this writing) with
continuing OSA support, this successful conference has provided perhaps the greatest testament
to the continuous technological development and widespread impact of the eld with its 19volume series of hardcover proceedings [4]. OSA journals became the primary source of
publications on ultrafast optics and photonics. Multiple sessions on ultrafast optics and its
applications every year at conferences like CLEO, QELS, IQEC, and OFC have been essential to
advancing the technology and its applications to science and engineering.
Flashlamp-Pumped Picosecond Systems

Nd:glass Lasers
The era of ultrashort pulses began in earnest with the demonstrations in the mid-1960s, by
DeMaria and co-workers at United Aircraft, of passive (self) mode-locking in a Nd:glass laser.
Mode locking was achieved with a cell of absorbing dye inside the laser that was designed to
bleach (saturate) sufciently and rapidly enough to favor transmission of high intensity peaks
over continuous emission and, therefore, the development of short pulses. The passive,
saturable absorber technique, in various forms, remains the basis for ultrashort-pulse
237
generation today. The mode-locked Nd:glass laser pulses, too short to measure at rst, were later
veried to be on the order of 510 picoseconds in duration. For almost a decade, this laser system
dominated and drove the development of ultrashort-pulse technology and its applications. For the
second decade and a half, mode-locked dye lasers reigned and pushed pulse durations into the
femtosecond domain. Finally, with the emergence of new techniques in the late 1980s, passive modelocking of solid state lasers regained importance and led to the wide range of compact, robust,
femtosecond laser systems we have today.
Ultrafast Measurement Techniques and Applications

Stimulated by mode-locked Nd:glass laser demonstrations, many of the ultrashort-pulse characterization, manipulation, and application methods still in use today were invented and developed in the
1960s [5]. Within a year of the invention of the passively mode-locked Nd:glass laser, several methods
for pulse measurement with sub-picosecond resolution had been proposed and demonstrated. These
techniques essentially use optical pulses to measure themselves. The laser output beam is split into
two, one is delayed with respect to the other, and they are combined in a nonlinear crystal to generate
second harmonic light (SHG). SHG is a maximum when the two pulses exactly overlap and decreases
with delay in either direction. A plot of SHG versus delay yields the second-order autocorrelation
function of the pulse intensity I(t). Fitting the observed intensity autocorrelation function to that
expected for the pulses requires some assumptions about pulse shape, as this simple method is
inherently insensitive to pulse asymmetry. Nevertheless, information about substructure and frequency chirp within the pulse can be deduced by comparing the assumed t with that expected from
the optical frequency spectrum. Methods for complete pulse characterization via frequency-resolved
optical gating (FROG) were not developed until the early 1990s. The relatively slow repetition rate of
ashlamp-pumped systems made the requirement of repetitive measurements at variable delay
somewhat tedious at rst. More rapid progress was permitted by the invention of a single-shot
method in which two identical copies of a pulse are passed through a two-photon absorbing medium
in counterpropagating fashion. The two-photon-induced uorescence (TPF) intensity pattern, viewed
from the side, provides another direct measure of the second-order autocorrelation function.
Although widely used and valuable in early work, the TPF method subsequently gave way again
to SHG-based methods with the advent of high repetition-rate continuous wave (CW) systems in the
mid-1970s.
Most other present-day methods for manipulating pulses and applying them also developed
rapidly during this period. It was shown that pairs of gratings can compensate for the chirp
produced by linear dispersion in a laser. It followed that pulses could be shortened further by
external self-phase modulation followed by a grating pair. Ultrafast responses in materials were
observed by splitting a pulse beam into two, an excitation (pump) and a probe, and varying the time
delay between them. Continuum generation, discovered by Alfano and Shapiro, made possible the
simultaneous probing of changes over broad spectra. The ultrafast optical Kerr shutter, invented by
Duguay and co-workers, was used as a picosecond camera to captured dramatic images of light
pulses in ight (see Fig. 1 [6,7]) and to carry out the rst demonstrations of 3D imaging via variable
delay optical gating that later inspired the development by Jim Fujimoto of OCT for medical
imaging (see Fig. 2). Other still-useful techniques such as up-conversion gating and transient grating
spectroscopy were also demonstrated during this era. Scientic applications expanded to wideranging studies of nonlinear optics, picosecond interactions in liquids, and ultrafast processes in
chemistry and biology [5].
Pulsed Dye Lasers

Known to have even more broadband potential than the Nd:glass laser, dye lasers were pursued shortly
thereafter. The rst experiments utilized picosecond pulses from frequency-doubled Nd:glass lasers to
generate similarly short pulses from dye lasers. Passive mode-locking of the ashlamp-pumped
Rhodamine 6G laser with a saturable dye soon followed. Within a few years the wavelength coverage
of ultrashort-pulse dye lasers ranged from almost 400 nm to 1150 nm and amplied peak powers in the
238
Fig. 1.
Light in ight. An optical Kerr effect shutter, operated by a picosecond infrared pulse, is used to capture
the image of a picosecond pulse passing through a lightly scattering liquid. (a) experimental arrangement (b) the
photo. Reprinted with permission from M. A. Duguay and J. W. Hansen, Appl. Phys. Lett. 15, 192194 1969,
AIP Publishing LLC.
gigawatt range had been demonstrated, to a great extent by the Bradley group at Imperial College.
As the pulse-forming dynamics of dye systems began to be studied in detail, the following question
arose: How were such short pulses generated with saturable absorber dyes having much longer recovery
times? In Nd:glass lasers, pulses were shown in studies to build up from noise, with the saturable
absorber selecting the most intense pulse and determining the nal duration by its recovery time. Dyelaser pulses were getting much shorter. This could happen, according to the insight of G. H. C. New,
because, although bleaching the saturable absorber could only shape the leading edge of the pulse
shorter than its recovery time, the trailing edge could be shaped by rapid saturation (depletion) of the
dye gain medium. By 1975 all of these analyses were put into the subsequently very inuential steadystate analytical descriptions, by Haus, of fast and slow saturable-absorber mode-locking that
predicted shapes, durations, and stability [8,9,10].
Continuous-Wave Femtosecond Systems

CW Dye Lasers
Mode-locking of CW dye lasers offered a range of new possibilities for ultrashort-pulse generation.
The continuous sources of high-repetition-rate pulses greatly facilitated measurement and the
optimization of pulse characteristics via cavity alignment and saturable absorber concentration.
With the rst reports, in 1972, of passive mode-locking of a CW dye laser, pulses as short as 1.5 ps
were reported. Within a year, the rst pulses shorter than a picosecond had been produced by
Shank and Ippen at Bell Labs (Fig. 3). The femtosecond era had begun. Pulses of 300 fs duration were
soon achieved, and application of this new femtosecond capability to studies of ultrafast dynamics
in physics, chemistry, and biology followed rapidly. Novel up-conversion pump-probe methods
were developed, pulses of 500 fs in duration were amplied to peak powers of gigawatt intensities,
and synchronized continuum generation made possible sub-picosecond time-resolved spectroscopy with greatly improved sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio. Invention of the colliding-pulse
239
Fig. 2. MIT Ultrafast Optics

Lab 1985. Erich Ippen and
student James Fujimoto view
experiment achieving the rst
demonstration of optical ranging
through skin, prelude to the
development of Optical
Coherence Tomography by
James Fujimoto.
mode-locked (CPM) geometry in 1981 at Bell Labs reduced pulse durations to the 100-fs level and
further improved stability. The interplay between self-phase modulation and internal dispersion was
analyzed theoretically and optimized experimentally via prism pairs to reduce durations further to
below 30 fs. Rapid progress was made by several groups, and with amplication and external
compression, a record duration of 6 fs, a record that lasted more than a decade, was achieved.
Amplied systems, pumped by either 10-Hz frequency-doubled Nd:YAG lasers (Fig. 4) or by kHz
copper-vapor lasers, further extended the capability of femtosecond technology and its range of
applications. The experiments leading to the 1999 Nobel Prize for chemistry [1] were achieved with
this early femtosecond dye-laser technology.
Semiconductor Diode Lasers

Recognized as having gain response times very similar to those of dye lasers, semiconductor diode lasers
also became the subject of mode-locking attempts. Shortly after active mode-locking was rst
demonstrated at MIT in 1978, passive mode-locking of a GaAlAs diode laser in an external cavity
produced 5-ps pulse durations at a repetition rate of 850 MHz. Sub-picosecond pulses were later
achieved at higher repetition rates, and integrated CPM geometry devices produced pulses as short as
640 fs at a repetition rate of 350 GHz. Impressive demonstrations of high-power, sub-picosecond pulses
240
Fig. 3.
The rst femtosecond laser, a Rhodamine 6G dye laser passively mode-locked by a DODCI saturable
absorber dye. (a) Instruments record the pulse train and a sub-picosecond-resolution pump-probe trace of a molecular
response. (b) Chuck Shank and Erich Ippen with their laser.
were achieved by Delfyett and co-workers with pulse compression and semiconductor optical
amplication. Stable, transform-limited pulse generation with semiconductor diodes has, however,
for the most part depended on external-cavity-controlled picosecond sources. Pump-probe investigations revealed that ultrafast nonequilibrium carrier dynamics in a semiconductor make the generation
of pulses shorter than 1 ps problematic.
Color-Center Lasers
An important capability for early 1.5-m-wavelength ultrafast research was provided by the CW
color-center laser. First mode-locked by synchronous pumping, the KCl color center laser was thrust
into further prominence by Mollenauers demonstration at Bell Labs that it could produce
femtosecond pulses by operating as a soliton laser. This was achieved by coupling the laser
output into an anomalously dispersive, soliton-shaping, optical ber, the output of which was then
coupled back into the laser. It was soon discovered, however, that soliton formation in the ber was
not necessary since this coupled-cavity approach also worked with normal-dispersion ber.
Experiments at MIT further revealed the underlying pulse-shortening mechanism to be the
interference of each pulse with a copy of itself that had been self-phase modulated in the ber.
This method, dubbed additive-pulse mode locking (APM), was shown to be compatible with the
Haus fast-absorber model. Recognized as a means of creating an articial fast absorber out of
reactive nonlinearity in a lossless dielectric, APM then stimulated the application of this technique to
a variety of other lasers [11].
Fiber Lasers
Interest in ber lasers developed rapidly after demonstrations at Southhampton of efcient optical
amplication in low-loss bers doped with rare earths. The key mechanism for ultrashort-pulse
generation in ber lasersnonlinear polarization rotationwas also found to be describable by the
fast-absorber model of Haus developed in the context of APM analysis. Earliest progress was made
using Nd:ber lasers, in both actively mode-locked and passively mode-locked congurations. By 1992
pulse durations as short as 38 fs had been generated at 1.06 m in a Nd:ber laser utilizing nonlinear
polarization rotation and prism pairs for dispersion compensation. By the turn of the century, however,
241
Fig. 4. High power, 3-stage,

femtosecond dye laser amplier
pumped by frequency-doubled
Nd:YAG laser at 10 Hz.
development of the much more efcient Yb:ber laser led to considerably higher powers at 1 m
wavelengths, with similarly short pulses and more compact geometries. In the late 1980s the attention
of researchers also turned to Er:ber lasers for wavelengths being used for optical ber communications
and where bers were anomalously dispersive, permitting soliton pulse shaping and shortening. Subpicosecond pulses were rst achieved, at NRL and at Southhampton in gure-eight geometries that used
a nonlinear loop mirror for intensity modulation and pulse stabilization, and then, at MIT and
Southhampton, in the ring geometry stabilized by nonlinear polarization rotation that achieved
common usage. The MIT stretched-pulse laser achieved shorter pulses and higher pulse energies and
was soon commercialized. Although not geared to the high-power applications of Yb:ber lasers,
Er:ber lasers continue to be pursued for silicon photonics, ber-based communications, and a variety
of eye-safe applications.
Free-space Solid-state Lasers

The discovery of APM and the prospect it offered for CW mode-locked solid-state lasers led to its
application to Nd:YAG, Nd:YLF, and Ti:sapphire systems. To permit amplication to high power,
Strickland and Mourou in 1985 demonstrated the chirped-pulse amplication (CPA) scheme that
would ultimately open the door to attosecond and petawatt optical physics. With the discovery of the
Kerr-lens mode-locked (KLM) Ti:sapphire laser in 1991 by the Sibbett group in St. Andrews, KLM
became the dominant ultrashort-pulse generation mechanism in free-space solid-state lasers. Femtosecond science and technology entered a new era, one with a wider variety of femtosecond-laser media,
shorter pulses, extreme powers, ultrabroad bandwidths, and, quite dramatically, the convergence of
ultrashort-pulse lasers with ultranarrow-linewidth lasers, precision spectroscopy, and optical clocks.
This modern era is the subject of a following article.
References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
A. H. Zewail, Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1999.

T. W. Hnsch, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2005.
J. L. Hall, Nobel Prize in Physics, 2005.
Ultrafast Phenomena IXVIII, Springer Series in Chemical Physics (Springer, 19782012).
S. L. Shapiro, ed., Ultrashort Light Pulses, 2nd ed., Vol. 18 of Topics in Applied Physics, (SpringerVerlag, 1984).
6. M. A. Duguay and J. W. Hansen, An ultrafast light gate, Appl. Phys. Lett. 15, 192194 (1969).
242
7. M. A. Duguay, Light photographed in ight: Ultrahigh-speed photographic techniques now give us a

portrait of light in ight as it passes through a scattering medium, Am. Sci. 5, 550556 (1971).
8. H. A. Haus, Theory of mode locking with a fast saturable absorber, J. Appl. Phys 46, 30493058
(1975).
9. H. A. Haus, Theory of mode locking with a slow saturable absorber, IEEE J. Quantum Electron. 11,
736746 (1975).
10. E. P. Ippen, Principles of passive mode locking, Appl. Phys. B 58, 159170 (1994).
11. A. M. Weiner, Ultrafast Optics (Wiley, 2009).
243
19751990
Ground-Based Telescopes
and Instruments
James Breckinridge
y 1916, the American astronomer George Ellery Hale (see Fig. 1), a founding member of
The Optical Society (OSA), had designed and built an optical solar telescope on
Mt. Wilson and measured the strength of magnetic elds on the Sun using his new
invention: the solar magnetograph. This opened a new era in astronomy and demonstrated to all
the merits of adding optical physics to astronomy. In 1916 the Mt. Wilson Observatory, under
the direction of Hale, had just completed the 60-inch reecting telescope and it was becoming
productive. Hale hired George Ritchey to gure the 60-inch mirror with a hyperbolic primary
and secondary to extend the eld of view (FOV) of the standard Cassegrain telescope. Most
astronomical telescopes today use this optical conguration.
Hales career started out at the University of Chicago, where he met A. A. Michelson (OSA
Honorary Member) in 1889 when he arrived at the University of Chicago. Hale nominated
Michelson for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1907. In 1916 Hale, director of Mt. Wilson
Observatory, was elected vice-president of OSA. Later (in 1935) he would be awarded the
Frederic Ives Medal. Obsessed with optical astronomy since childhood, Hale graduated from
MIT in physics and studied solar physics at Harvard. Hale recognized the advantages of
reectors and in 1908 used a 60-inch-diameter glass disk given to him by his father to build
the worlds largest telescope on Mt. Wilson in southern California. By 1916 Hale had obtained
funds from John D. Hooker, a Chicago philanthropist, and he was building, once again, the
worlds largest telescope: the 100-inch, dedicated in 1917. The 100-inch Hooker ground-based
telescope is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope of today. By 1935, Hale had sold the
Rockefeller Foundation on supporting the design and construction of a 200-inch telescope and
set off for a third time to build the worlds largest telescope. George Ellery Hale engaged private
nancial support for optical telescopes from wealthy barons of the industrial revolution: Yerkes,
Carnegie, Hooker, and Rockefeller. Figure 2 shows Hale with Andrew Carnegie in 1910. Hale
established the tradition of private support that continues today with the Keck telescopes, Sloan
Digital Sky Survey, and others.
Using new sensitive photographic emulsions developed by C. E. K. Mees (for whom the OSA
Mees Medal is named), Edwin Hubble (shown in Fig. 3) imaged several Cepheid variables in the
Andromeda Galaxy (M-31). The average luminosity of these variables is constant. Therefore, a
measurement of the brightness of these very faint objects in M31 gives a direct measure of the
distance. The measured distance was well outside our galaxy, demonstrating that spiral nebulae
were outside our galaxy and thus proving that the universe was very large indeed! Hubble went
on to show that the universe was expanding, thus providing fundamental evidence for todays
big bang cosmology.
In 1930 an Estonian optician, Bernard Schmidt, developed his Schmidt camera for the
imaging of large areas of the sky. For the rst time, astronomers could make wide-FOV
surveys needed to study the large-scale structure of our galaxy and to create catalogs of
spectral types and variable stars in an efcient manner. The rst large-aperture Schmidt
cameras were the 40-cm-aperture at Mt. Palomar (1936) and the 60-cm at Case Western
Reserve University (1939).
244
In 1946 Aden Meinel (1982 Ives Medalist,

1952 Lomb Medalist, and OSA President) built
the rst high-speed Schmidt camera and discovered the OH bands in the IR spectrum of the
atmosphere using recently declassied infraredsensitive photographic emulsions. James Baker
(OSA Ives Medalist) improved on Schmidts design to create the BakerNunn camera for wideangle observations of articial satellites passing
rapidly overhead.
Hale conceived the 200-inch telescope shortly
after the dedication of the 100-inch telescope in
1917. The task of raising funds, keeping the vision
alive, and preparing conceptual designs occupied
most the 1920s. By 1928 Hale secured a grant of
$6 million from the Rockefeller Foundation to
complete the design and begin construction of the
200-inch telescope on Mt. Palomar. The Corning
Glass Works, an OSA Corporate Member,
working over a ten-year period, developed the
technology and cast the Pyrex primary mirror.
Construction of the observatory facilities began
Fig. 1. George Ellery Hale, astronomer and
in 1936 but was interrupted by the onset of World
founding member of the OSA. Credit Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. (The University of
War II. The telescope was completed and dedicatChicago Yerkes Observatory, courtesy AIP Emilio
ed in 1948. Ira Bowen (1952 Ives Medalist)
Segre Visual Archives.)
rened the optical system and the grating spectrographs and rebuilt the mirror support system.
The telescope was not open for scientic use until 1949, and the rst astronomer to use it was
Edwin Hubble.
John Strong (1956 Ives Medalist and OSA President), demonstrated the advantages of using an
evaporative aluminum coating on the 100-inch telescope in 1936. Before this, chemically deposited
silver was used, which degraded rapidly to limit the faintest magnitude that could be recorded. The
reectivity of silver degrades signicantly within a few days. Al coatings on mirrors are robust and with
proper care retain high reectivity for years. This increase in telescope transmittance enabled
astronomers to record stars several magnitudes fainter than before.
During World War II, most optical astronomers were involved in the war effort. Scanners, detectors,
photomultipliers, mirror coatings, manufacturing methods for large glass mirrors, and high-speed
cameras were just a few of the technologies developed by optical astronomers during this period.
At the end of the war optical astronomers returned to civilian jobs. The new infrared-sensitive
photographic lms developed during the conict were now used to extend astronomical discoveries into
the infrared. Photomultipliers were used to make precision measurements of stellar brightness and
color. These data improved our understanding of stellar evolution and reddening (absorption) due to
interstellar matter.
The National Science Foundation was founded in 1950. Its earliest research center was the Kitt
Peak National Observatory founded in 1955 operated under a board of directors from several
university astronomy departments. Aden Meinel, an astronomy professor and optical scientist from
the University of Chicago, was selected to be the founding director. The purpose of the observatory was
to provide astronomical telescope time on a peer-review selection basis to all astronomers in the U.S.
Under Meinels direction the observatory developed the process for the thermal slump of a Pyrex mirror
around a conformal mold (used in the 82-inch telescope), created a rocket program for UV spectroscopy of stellar objects, developed the worlds largest solar observatory (the 60-inch McMath-Pierce),
developed a 50-inch robot telescope for photoelectric photometry, and laid the groundwork for the rst
program in observational infrared astrophysics.
245
Fig. 2.
George Ellery Hale (right) possibly discussing future telescopes with Andrew Carnegie (center) in 1910.
(Image courtesy The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science Collection at the Huntington Library, San
Marino, California.)
In 1960 Meinel left the Kitt Peak National Observatory to become the director of Steward
Observatory. There he led the academic program, developed a 92-inch telescope for the University of
Arizona on Kitt Peak Mountain and led an initiative to establish a national center of excellence in
optical sciences and engineering, focused on many issues related to technology for astronomical
telescopes and instruments. In 1964 funding became available, and the University of Arizona
established the Optical Sciences Center under Adens leadership. Aden established a distinguished
faculty composed of A. F. Turner (Ives Medalist), R. R. Shannon (1985 OSA President), R. V. Shack
(David Richardson Medalist), J. C. Wyant (2010 OSA President), and Roger Angel (OSA Fellow).
Figure 4 shows Aden Meinel in 1985 while at NASA/JPL. In 1973 Aden resigned from the directorship
to continue research in solar thermal energy, and Peter Franken (OSA Wood Prize and OSA President)
became director.
In the late 1970s Roger Angel (OSA member) experimented with spin casting Pyrex mirrors for
astronomical telescopes. This development has led to a family of 8-meter ground-based telescopes,
which are revolutionizing our astrophysical understanding of the universe around the world.
In 1920 optical physicist A. A. Michelson (OSA Honorary Member) made the rst measurements
of the diameter of a star using a white-light spatial interferometer mounted to the top of the 100-inch
telescope. Atmospheric seeing and telescope stability prohibited useful data using the photographic
plates of the time, and both he and his colleague F. G. Pease resorted to visual observations of
ickering fringes to measure the diameter of stars. Breckinridge (OSA Fellow) recorded the rst direct
images of the fringes more than 50 years later. C. H. Townes (1996 Ives Medalist and Nobel
246
Laureate) developed the heterodyne-interferometer

method and made early measurements of details of
stellar atmospheres. Townes also invented the
laser, which astronomers use in conjunction with
adaptive optics to provide reference laser guide
stars to remove atmospheric turbulence and enable
diffraction-limited imaging from large-aperture
ground-based astronomical telescopes. Over the
past 30 years stellar optical interferometry has
advanced to become a highly useful tool for the
astronomy community. Today, several groundbased observatories use optical interferometry to
measure high-angular-resolution (<0.001 arc sec)
details across the surfaces of stars in the presence of
Earths atmospheric turbulence.
This 25-year period from 1975 to 2000 in the
history of the OSA saw an explosive growth in
technologies to make very large mirrors, long-baseline interferometers, large-area detectors, and space
telescope systems. Angular resolution on the sky
went from 0.5 arc sec to 0.001 arc sec and the
surfaces of hundreds of stars were resolved. The
high-speed electronics developed for military and
commercial applications and innovative optical systems enabled long-baseline Michelson stellar interferometers for high-angular-resolution astronomy.
Astronomers used atmospheric-turbulence-induced
speckle patterns to create diffraction-limited images
at large optical telescopes and thus make the rst
direct images across the surfaces of stars. The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO) was built and
launched, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
was built and corrected.
Mt. Wilson astronomers discovered that larger
telescopes, while collecting more photons than
smaller telescopes, did not necessarily mean observing fainter objects. Atmospheric turbulence
introduces wavefront errors as a function of time.
Three major problems confronted the implementation of a system to correct atmospherically induced
time-dependent phase perturbations. These were
the need for (1) wavefront sensing, (2) a deformable mirror, and (3) signal and control processing.
Several OSA members pioneered practical solutions to these problems to increase the angular
resolution on the sky from the seeing-limited 0.5
arc sec to 0.005 arc sec for a gain of 10,000 in area
resolution. Although no one person was responsible
for the invention of adaptive optics, OSA Fellows
John Hardy and Mark Ealey and others from ITEK
Optical Systems (OSA Corporate Member at the
time) led the technology development of groundbased telescope systems to image distant objects
Fig. 3. Edwin Hubble, who proved that the

universe is much larger than we thought and is
expanding. (Hale Observatories, courtesy AIP Emilio
Segre Visual Archives.)
Fig. 4. Aden Meinel in 1985 while at NASA/JPL.

(Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech P-31041A.)
247
through atmospheric turbulence for the

Air Force. At Kirtland Air Force Base Bob
Fugate (OSA Fellow) demonstrated laser
guide star adaptive optics, a technology in
common use today at the Keck Telescope
and a critical part of the new very large 30meter-class telescopes. Figure 5 shows a
laser guide star being used to compensate
for atmospheric distortion.
Today there are four optical telescopes with apertures over 10 meters and
nine 8-meter-class optical telescopes in operation nightly recording faint radiation
from the cosmos. The Keck Ten-MeterDiameter Telescope Project, under the
technical leadership of Jerry Nelson (OSA
Senior Member) pioneered the large aperture segmented phased telescope in common use today. OSA Corporate Members
Corning Glass and Schott Glass and the
University of Arizona under the leadership
of OSA Fellow Roger Angel pioneered the
design and cost-effective manufacture of
monolithic mirror blanks 8 meters in
diameter.
In 2016, on the occasion of the 100th
anniversary of the OSA, there are three
very ambitious projects underway to build
astronomical optical telescopes with 30meter-aperture-class phased primary mirrors. Each of these will be equipped with
Fig. 5. A laser guide star tuned to the wavelength of sodium
laser guide star adaptive optics to remove
atoms in the atmosphere, providing information on atmospheric
the effects of atmospheric turbulence and
turbulence to allow for adaptive optics to compensate and
thus enable diffraction-limited imaging
enable improved telescope resolution. (Laurie Hatch.)
at resolutions approaching 3 milliarcsec
steerable over a FOV on the order of 20
arc min. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will have over 500 phased mirror segments. The Giant
Magellan Telescope (GMT) will have seven 8-meter mirrors in a hexagonal pattern with one of the
mirrors at the center. The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will have 798 hexagonal segments each
1.45 meters across to create a 40-meter-diameter primary mirror.
The past 100 years of optical telescope development has led to profound changes in our
understanding of the universe. The next 100 years of optical astronomy may reveal that mankind
is not alone in the universe and that life exists and ourishes on planets around distant starsstars so
far away that our only contact will be with the optical photons reected from the surface of exoplanets.
Innovative spectrometers and polarimeters will be used to estimate the presence of life. Only if humans
invent a way around the limits of speed-of-light travel will two-way communication with exoplanet life
be possible.
248
19751990

James Breckinridge
n 1946, Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University proposed the construction of a space

telescope for astrophysics, and Princeton astronomers launched several balloon-borne
telescopes (Stratoscope project) to operate in the dry excellent seeing provided by the upper
stratosphere to demonstrate the value of space science.
At the very beginning of NASA, Nancy Roman, Lyman Spitzer, and Art Code laid out a
space satellite program that envisioned a series of modest-aperture telescopes for UV and optical
astronomy [the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO)] and an R&D program leading to a
large space telescope. The seeds of the Hubble Space Telescope were sown 35 years before its
launch.
In 1962 the worlds rst space telescope was launched, and it recorded the UV spectrum of
the Sun. The OAO program became a series of three space telescopes. The rst OAO was to carry
experiments, and observing time was to be shared between the two university groups that
produced the instruments. However, when that satellite was launched, it almost immediately selfdestructed before the scientic instruments could be turned on.
NASA quickly organized an additional launch using ight spares of the satellite and the
scientic instruments. That satellite was successful and is referred to now as OAO-2. It was
launched 7 December 1968, carried 11 UV telescopes, and operated until 1973. OAO-2
discovered that comets are surrounded by enormous halos of hydrogen several hundred
thousand kilometers across and made observations of novae to nd that their UV brightness
often increased during the decline in their optical brightness.
OAO-3 (Copernicus) was orbited in August of 1972 and carried an 80-cm-diameter telescope
for UV astronomy. OAO-3 successfully operated for 14 years and established an excellent
reputation for the highest-quality astronomical data at the time. The Copernicus mission played
a large role in winning the support of the wider astronomical community for space astronomy, not
only because of the very high-quality data it produced, covering the UV to below the Lyman limit,
but also because of the serious commitment Spitzer and his Princeton colleagues showed to making
the data available and easily interpretable. Complete spectra were obtained for only about 500
stars, very modest by todays standards. But the scientic impact of those spectra was huge!
The concept for a series of four large telescopes, called the Great Observatories, evolved at
NASA starting in the 1980s. In order of increasing wavelength they were Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory (CGRO), Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), now called Chandra, the
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF), now called
Spitzer. Optical Society (OSA) members had a major role in the development of AXAF, Chandra,
and Spitzer.
HST started out as the Large Space Telescope (LST) with a 3-meter aperture. Soon the reality
of the launch vehicle capacity set in and NASA issued a request for information to the industry
for a 2.4-meter-diameter telescope. Three optics companies, all corporate members of OSA,
responded with feasibility studies: Eastman Kodak, Itek, and Perkin-Elmer. Perkin-Elmer was
selected as the primary telescope provider. NASA recognized that the longest lead item in the
procurement would be the primary mirror and directed Perkin-Elmer to fund Eastman Kodak to
provide a back-up mirror. This mirror is now at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Corning
manufactured both of the ultra-low expansion (ULE) honeycomb 2.4-meter mirror blanks. PE
was responsible for the telescope, and Lockheed Sunnyvale was the spacecraft system integrator.
249
Large was dropped from the LST name during its development, and later it was renamed after
Edwin Hubble to become the HST. NASA Headquarters issued a competitive-science solicitation for
instruments. These UV/optical/IR science instruments were designed to be replaced on-orbit.
The HST became the worlds rst scientic instrument with the capability to be serviced multiple
times on-orbit. The instruments selected were the Wide-Field Planetary Camera (WF/PC), the Faint
Object Camera (FOC), the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS), and the High Speed Photometer (HSP). The HST primary mirror was maintained near
room temperature. That combined with the poor IR detectors at the time prohibited an infrared
astronomy instrument.
HST was scheduled for launch in 1986 soon after the Challenger mission that ended in disaster.
The shuttle eet was grounded for 32 months, delaying the HST launch to late April 1990. By the end of
May 1990 it was discovered that the telescope could not be focused, and in June the error was suggested
to be spherical aberration. NASA headquarters formed two teams. One, the ofcial NASA optical
failure review board led by Dr. Lew Allen (a retired four-star general and JPL director) had membership
and support from Optical Society Fellows Roger Angel, Bob Shannon, John Mangus, Jim Breckinridge,
and Bob Parks. This team investigated the root cause of the error. The other board, the Hubble
Independent Optical Review Panel (HIORP) was led by Optical Society Fellow Duncan Moore. Optical
Society Fellows Aden and Marjorie Meinel, Dietrich Korsch, Dan Schulte, Art Vaughan, and George
Lawrence, among others, were members. The HIORP had broad membership from the optics and
astronomy communities and was charged with making recommendations on how to x the error. The
nations optics community came together to establish that the error was on the primary. Nine optics
groups composed of many Optical Society Members and Fellows across the country made independent
measurements on the PE test apparatus hardware and on digital images recorded by the hardware onorbit. The recording of star images across the eld of view and at different telescope focus settings
provided a diverse set of image data for the new prescription retrieval algorithms. For the rst time, the
on-orbit optical prescription was determined precisely. The intensity of this work is evidenced by the
fact that it was completed over a ten-week period to meet the instrument rebuild schedule for a repair
mission launch.
An accurate value for the telescope primary-mirror conic constant and the fact that the error was
isolated to the primary enabled corrective optics to be integrated into a newly built WF/PC2 (designed
and built by NASA/JPL), and a new optical system called COSTAR. COSTAR was designed and built
by Ball, an Optical Society Corporate Member. Both instruments were inserted into HST on the rst
repair mission. The COSTAR optical system replaced the HSP instrument. This new optical
system corrected the wavefront for the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), the Faint Object Camera
(FOC), and the GHRS. In 1997 the IR
system NICMOS was launched replacing
COSTAR to give the telescope its rst IR
capability to 2-m wavelength.
Today, at the one hundredth anniversary of The Optical Society, the HST has
been successfully operating for 26 years.
By far it is the most productive scientic
UV/optical instrument ever known, a spectacular monument to the space optics community and the many dedicated Optical
Society members who saved the mission
from disaster. Figure 1 is a photo of the
HST in orbit taken from the space shuttle
after a service mission. One of the most
famous and spectacular photos taken by
HST is shown in Fig. 2. It is the so-called
pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula
Fig. 1. The HST in orbit. (Image courtesy of NASA.)
where stars, and by implication their
250
exoplanet systems, are seen forming in the

dust clouds.
The x-ray telescope mission, Chandra, was launched in 1999, 33 years
after the proposal by Riccardo Giacconi
and Harvey Tananbaum. Chandra uses
two sets of nested-cylinder mirrors in the
hyperbolaparabola conguration of the
Woljter type-2-conguration grazingincidence x-ray telescope built by Eastman Kodak. Chandras angular resolution is unmatched: between 80% and
95% of the incoming x-ray energy is
focused into a 1-arcsec circle. Leon van
Speybroek led the details of the optical
design and the fabrication of the mirrors.
Furthermore, x-rays reect only at glancing angles, like skipping pebbles across a
pond, so the mirrors must be shaped like
cylinders rather than the familiar dish
shape of mirrors on optical telescopes.
Fig. 2. The pillars of creation. Star formation in the Eagle
The Chandra X-ray Observatory connebula photographed by the HST. (Image courtesy of NASA,
ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen [Arizona State University].)
tains four co-aligned pairs of mirrors.
Figure 3 shows an image of the Crab
Nebula recorded with the ACIS instrument superposed upon an image recorded with HST to show
the value of multispectral (visible and x-ray) imaging science.
Today, at the one hundredth anniversary of Optical Society, the Chandra has been successfully
operating for 15 years, three times its design lifetime, and it remains in highly productive operation.
Much excellent IR astronomy from telescopes on the ground has been done through those spectral
windows in the IR not absorbed by the Earths atmosphere. However, many exciting astrophysics
problems require the measurements of cold gas and dust available only using IR space telescopes, which
measure the temperature of the universe and need to be colder than the sky they measure. Two major
space cryogenic IR telescopes were designed, built, and launched to map the IR sky: the Infrared
Fig. 3.
This composite image uses data

from three of NASAs Great Observatories. The
Chandra x-ray image is shown in light blue, the
HST optical images are in green and dark blue,
and the Spitzer Space Telescopes infrared
image is in red. The size of the x-ray image is
smaller than the others because ultra-highenergy x-ray-emitting electrons radiate away
their energy more quickly than the lower-energy
electrons emitting optical and infrared light. The
neutron star, which has mass equivalent to the
Sun crammed into a rapidly spinning ball of
neutrons 12 miles across, is the bright white dot
in the center of the image. (X-Ray: NASA/CXC/
J. Hester [ASU]; Optical: NASA/ESA/J. Hester &
A. Loll [ASU]; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/
R. Gehrz [Univ. Minn.])
251
Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and Spitzer. Launched in 1983, the IRAS telescope system, whose
scientic development was led by Gerry Neugebauer, was the rst space observatory to perform an allsky survey at IR wavelengths. Engineering and development of the optical system was completed at Ball
Aerospace, an Optical Society Corporate Member, teamed with Steve Macenka, an Optical Society
Fellow, at JPL. IRAS discovered over 350,000 new sources, including stellar gas and dust envelopes
now known to be the birthplaces of exoplanet systems, some possibly similar to our own solar system.
The Spitzer telescope system, the fourth and nal telescope in the Great Observatory series, was
launched in 2003 into an Earth-trailing orbit. The primary, secondary, and metering structure are all
fabricated from berylium. The optics were congured at Tinsley, and cryo testing was carried out at
JPL. Diffraction-limited imaging at 6.5 m over a 30-arc-min eld of view was achieved.
By the year 2000, plans were underway to build an even larger space telescope, and NASA funded
the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) study, which led to the James Webb Space Telescope
(JWST), now scheduled for launch in 2019, in time to start the second hundred years of The Optical
Society. John Mather, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics 2006 and Optical Society Fellow, was the chief
scientist for the project during its formative years. This telescope builds on the success of the large
ground-based segmented telescopes, e.g., Keck. Telescopes with segmented primary mirrors that are
mechanically deployed once the spacecraft is in orbit make possible very large space telescopes.
Recently several smaller space optics systems have revolutionized our understanding of the
universe. These are: WISE, COBE, GALEX, Herschel, Planck, WIRE, WISE, and WMAP. The SOFIA
is a 3-meter telescope mounted in a B747 for IR observations above the atmosphere. The Kepler space
telescope launched March 2009 is a 0.95-meter clear-aperture Schmidt camera precision radiometer
that contains arrays of CCDs totaling 95 megapixels staring at 140,000 stars across a FOV of 105 deg2
in the constellation of Cygnus. The Kepler mission has discovered several thousand exoplanets and will
continue to revolutionize our understanding of the evolution of planetary systems, stellar atmospheres,
and stellar interiors as the enormous database is analyzed in detail over the coming decade.
Today one of the most exciting space optics programs is the design and construction of hypercontrast optical systems to characterize exoplanets in the presence of the intense radiation from the
central star of the exoplanet system. Terrestrial planets are 1 part per trillion as bright as the central
star. Spectrometric measurements are required of the radiation reecting and emitting from the
exoplanet. These measurements provide data to estimate planetary surface and atmospheric composition! Direct observation of rocky terrestrial planets, which might harbor life as we know it, requires
large-aperture telescopes. This is an opportunity to answer one of humanitys most compelling
questions: Are we alone in the universe?
In addition to using spectrometric measurements to resolve the question of composition, optical
spectrometers are also used to determine the radial (along the line of sight) velocity as a function of time
to an accuracy of centimeters per second. Precision optical astrometry is used to determine the motion
of stars across the sky to precisions approaching microarcsec. These two measurements provide the
data we need to calculate the orbit of the planet about its parent star.
Direct images and spectra of exoplanets at contrast levels of 10-10 are needed so astronomers can
record the light reected from the exoplanet and search for life signatures in the atmosphere and on the
surface. All of these require new-technology optical systems operating in the harsh space environment
out from under the turbulence of the Earths atmosphere. Today, astronomical science, enabled by
innovative optical telescope and instrument design, is on the threshold of revealing details on the
evolution of the universe and the presence of life beyond Earth.
The JWST is the largest space optical system under construction now. It represents the state of the
art in optical design, engineering, fabrication, and testing. The JWST will replace the spectacularly
successful Hubble Space Telescope with a much more capable system promising further astounding
discoveries.
252
19751990
Contact Lenses for Vision

Correction: A Journey from Rare
to Commonplace
Ian Cox
lthough the rst practical contact lens was described in 1888 [1], glass-blown shells
formed individually to rest on the sclera and vault across the cornea were the norm until
the 1930s. The advent of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) made it possible, in a
method pioneered by William Feinbloom [2], to process an all-plastic lens that could be tted by
custom molding or trial tting from a range of premade lenses. This reduced the weight and cost
of lenses while improving comfort and wearing times. It was not until 1948 that Kevin Tuohy, an
optician, made the rst corneal contact lens [3]. Accidentally cutting through a scleral shell at the
edge of the optic zone, Tuohy tried the small-diameter lens that was left on his own eye and
quickly realized that a lens tted within the cornea could be more comfortable and provide longer
wearing times than a scleral shell. The realization by Smelser and Ozanics that oxygen for corneal
metabolism came directly from the atmosphere led to a major shift to corneal contact lenses
because the t could be adjusted to replenish the oxygenated tear lm with every blink, thus
extending comfortable wearing times from just a few hours. The contact lens market expanded
with commercially available corneal contact lens designs enabling the correction of myopia,
hyperopia, astigmatism, and even novel bifocal designs for presbyopia correction.
Otto Wichterle (Fig. 1) was a brilliant Czech polymer chemist who made the worlds rst
soft contact lenses from his newly invented HEMA hydrogel material [4]. This 38% water
content material was highly exible, oxygen permeable, and signicantly more comfortable than
the rigid PMMA corneal contact lenses that were available. Although working behind the Iron
Curtain, an American patent company acquired the intellectual property rights from Wichterle
and licensed them to Bausch & Lomb (B&L). The company licensed both the material and the
novel spincasting manufacturing technique that Wichterle had developed in his own kitchen.
The prototype for this production method was built from an erector set, powered by the electric
motor from his phonograph (Fig. 2). Henry Knoll, a physicist working at B&L and one of a team
assigned to developing the Wichterle prototypes, pointed out the difculty in working with this
hydrogel material. The rst lens we released commercially was called the C series lens, we built
the A series and the B series but neither would stay on the eye after a few blinks. Management
said if the third design didnt work we would give up on the project. The C-series contact lens
design (Fig. 3) tted the eye, and although the optics were compromised by the wildy aspheric
posterior lens surface produced by the spincasting manufacturing process, the lens was a
commercial success when launched in 1971 following FDA approval. The dramatically improved
comfort changed the contact lens industry in the U.S., and ultimately the world, with rigid
corneal contact lenses today accounting for less than 10% of the lenses tted worldwide. Otto
Wichterle was recognized for his great contributions to the world of optics when he was awarded
the R. W. Wood Medal by The Optical Society (OSA) in 1984.
Initially available only in spherical powers to correct myopia and later hyperopia, soft
lenses to correct astigmatism were rst introduced in the U.S. in the early 1980s. Unlike rigid
lenses which mask the astigmatic component of the cornea, soft lenses conform to the
253
Fig. 1. Otto Wichterle, Czech polymer

chemist, inventor of the rst hydrogel
material to be used in making soft contact
lenses. Wichterle was responsible for
making the rst usable soft contact lenses in
his lab behind the Iron Curtain. (AIP Emilio
Serge Visual Archives, Physics Today
Collection.)
Fig. 2. A model of the rst spin-casting machine

that Otto Wichterle used to make the rst soft contact
lenses in his kitchen.
underlying corneal shape, requiring a method of stabilization and orientation to be built into the
physical shape of the lens. The most successful designs used an increasing thickness prole in the
vertical meridian of the lens, allowing the squeeze force of the upper eyelid to stabilize the lens on
the eye between blinks. Multifocal soft lenses designed to correct presbyopia were introduced by
B&L and CIBA VISION in 1982. B&L used its early experience with signicant spherical aberration
in its rst lenses for myopia to help manufacture a lens with sufcient spherical aberration to expand
the depth of eld of the wearer. Ironically, after spending years trying to eliminate spherical
aberration inherent in the spincast lens product, B&L was purposely designing it in the lens with
the PA1 bifocal.
A major issue with soft contact lenses over the 1970s and 1980s was combating adverse ocular
responses related to deposition of protein and lipid on lens surfaces from the tear lm. This required
daily cleaning and disinfection routines and impacted the longevity of the lenses, prescribed as a single
pair to be worn daily for as long as they lasted, typically a year or more. A second issue was transmitting
sufcient oxygen from the atmosphere through lenses to ensure an adequate physiological environment
for the cornea. Many patients had their lens wear curtailed from insufcient oxygen being available to
the eyes during wearing. This was also the time of continuous wear, a modality where patients wore
their contact lenses constantly, with removal as needed for cleaning (typically every 30 days in the early
1980s) [5]. Although convenient, continuous wear only exacerbated the issues of deposition, reduced
lens life, and caused a signicant increase in ocular adverse responses due to reduced oxygen availability
to the cornea. In 1982, a small company in Denmark started cast molding hydrogel contact lenses and
packaging them in small plastic blisters with foil covers. All other companies delivered their lenses
individually, stored in a small glass serum vial, packaging that dated back to the original B&L lens.
Danalens was the rst disposable contact lens and lit the fuse on a major upheaval in the contact lens
industry (Fig. 4). Johnson and Johnson, sensing an opportunity to enter the lucrative contact lens
254
market in the U.S., acquired the Danalens production process and a small contact lens company
called Vistakon whose hydrogel lens material was
already approved by the FDA. Within ve years
Vistakon launched the rst disposable lens in the
United States (1987). Launched as a continuouswear lens to be replaced weekly, the marketplace
eventually dictated its use as a daily wear only (no
overnight wear) lens with a biweekly replacement
schedule. Although the oxygen permeability of these
new lenses was no better, the fact that patients could
buy them for only a few dollars each (previously
patients would typically pay hundreds of dollars for
a pair of lenses) and replace them frequently made
them a rapid success. Toric and multifocal options
soon followed as companies invested in the
manufacturing capacity necessary to process these
complex designs for a low cost. As manufacturing
technology improved and cost of goods decreased,
the option of a truly disposable lens, one that was
worn once and then discarded, became a reality.
Vistakon again led the industry by launching the
rst daily disposable contact lens in 1994. Although
the cost of each lens was less than one dollar to the
patient, the high annual cost prohibited rapid adoption of daily disposables, and it was another decade
before this modality made any signicant inroads
into the marketplace.
Fig. 3. The rst commercially available soft lens in
In the intervening years, others were still
the U.S., the Bausch & Lomb C Series. (Courtesy of
chasing the ultimate in convenience, a lens that
Andrew Gasson.)
was so physiologically compatible with the eye
that it could be worn continuously for 30 days
without the risk of adverse ocular responses. The massive oxygen permeability of silicone elastomer
led researchers to develop lenses made from this material in the late 1970s, with Dow Corning being
the most well-known manufacturer to try this alternative material. Although physiologically
successful, silicone elastomer lenses had one undesirable and potentially dangerous aw: their
rubber-like nature generated negative pressure under the lens during wear and resulted in the lens
sticking to the eye. The only path forward was a hybrid material, a silicone hydrogel. Although
seemingly simple, material scientists were essentially trying to mix oil and water and maintain a
transparent material. B&L, the rst company to bring soft hydrogel contact lenses to the market in
1972, were also the rst to develop a commercially viable silicone hydrogel lens. This lens provided
four times the oxygen transmission of hydrogel lenses, and it was approved for up to 30 days of
continuous wear in 1999. Clinicians immediately noted that highly oxygen transmissive lenses
eradicated signicant adverse responses related to oxygen deprivation at the cornea, but they were
slow to adopt silicone hydrogel lenses due to the up to 30 days continuous-wear indication awarded
by the FDA. Experience over the years had shown that corneal ulcers, or microbial keratitis, was the
single most signicant adverse response associated with continuous wear, with the FDA limiting
approval of all hydrogel lenses to six nights maximum in 1989 over their concern with incidence
levels. Clinicians and companies now recommend silicone hydrogel lenses for daily wear or extended
wear with monthly or more-frequent replacement, but the largest area of growth within the contact
lens industry is the daily wear modality.
Currently available soft lens materials provide excellent physiological compatibility with the eye,
and the cornea specically, when worn in a daily wear modality, and so the focus of the industry has
255
moved to improving end-of-day comfort through

design and material formulation, as well as improved optical performance. This last development
has been driven by the development of clinically
applicable HartmannSchack wavefront sensors.
Porter et al. [5] measured the wavefront error of
the eye of a large contact-lens-wearing population,
identifying that the Strehl ratio of the eye can be
signicantly improved by correcting at least the
major higher-order wavefront aberrations. This
technique proved to be an ideal method to evaluate
the optical performance of contact lenses on and off
the eye, and OSA members led the development of
standards for reporting the optical aberrations of
eyes. Ideally, individual prescription contact lenses
should be made for each eye based on wavefront
measurements performed in a clinical setting, enabling correction of all higher-order aberrations for
improved low-light vision. Although the feasibility
Fig. 4. Examples of the rst disposable soft contact
of this concept has been demonstrated by Marsack,
lens. Although the Danalens lens design and material
the challenge for industry is to deliver these customwere not unique, the packaging and delivery concept
optics contact lenses in the same low-cost, disposwere innovative and ultimately changed the way
able paradigm that patients and clinicians are curcontact lenses were sold the world over. (Courtesy of
rently using. In the meantime, at least one manufacAndrew Gasson.)
turer (B&L) is altering the inherent spherical aberration of their spherical and toric contact lens
products using aspheric optical surfaces to minimize the spherical aberration magnitude of the eye
with the lens in place and improve the quality of vision under low-illumination conditions.
References
1. R. M. Pearson and N. Efron, Hundredth anniversary of August Mllers inaugural dissertation on
contact lenses, Surv. Ophthalmol. 34, 133141 (1989).
2. R. B. Mandell, Contact Lens Practice, 4th ed. (Charles C. Thomas, 1988).
3. K. M. Tuohy, Contact lens, U.S. patent 2,510,438, led 28 February 1948. Issued 6 June 1950.
4. O. Wichterle and D. Lim, Hydrophilic gels for biological use, Nature 185, 117118 (1960).
5. J. Porter, A. Guirao, I. G. Cox, and D. R. Williams, Monochromatic aberrations of the human eye in a
large population, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 18, 17931803 (2001).
256
19751990
Excimer Laser Surgery: Laying

the Foundation for Laser
Refractive Surgery
James J. Wynne
Discovery of Excimer Laser Surgery

On 27 November 1981, the day after Thanksgiving, Rangaswamy Srinivasan brought Thanksgiving leftovers into the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he irradiated turkey
cartilage with 10-ns pulses of light from an argon uoride (ArF) excimer laser. This irradiation
produced a clean-looking incision, as observed through an optical microscope. Subsequently,
Srinivasan and his IBM colleague, Samuel E. Blum, carried out further irradiation of
cartilage samples. Srinivasan gave a sample to the author, and, for comparison, it was irradiated
with 10-ns pulses of 532-nm light from a Q-switched, frequency-doubled, Nd:YAG laser. This
irradiation did not incise the sample; rather it created a burned, charred region of tissue. Figure 1
shows three different views and magnications of scanning electron micrographs (SEMs) of the
sample, revealing the stunningly different morphology of the two irradiated regions: the clean
incision with no evidence of thermal damage, etched steadily deeper by a sequence of pulses of
193-nm light, and the damaged region produced by the pulses of 532-nm light.
Realizing that Srinivasan, Blum, and the author had discovered something novel and
unexpected, they wrote an invention disclosure, describing multiple potential surgical applications. They anticipated that the absence of collateral damage to the tissue underlying and
adjacent to the incision produced in vitro would result in minimal collateral damage when the
technique was applied in vivo. The ensuing healing would not produce scar tissue. This insight, a
radical departure from all other laser surgery, was unprecedented and underlies the subsequent
application of their discovery to laser refractive surgery.
Background to This Discovery

As manager of the Laser Physics and Chemistry department at the Watson Research Center, one
of the authors responsibilities was to ensure that there was access to the best and latest laser
instrumentation. When the excimer laser became commercially available, the author purchased
one for use by the scientists in his department. Since 1960, Srinivasan had been studying the
action of ultraviolet radiation on organic materials, e.g., polymers. In 1980, he and his technical
assistant, Veronica Mayne-Banton, discovered that the 10-ns pulses of far ultraviolet radiation
from the excimer laser could photo-etch solid organic polymers, if the uence of the radiation
exceeded an ablation threshold [1,2].
Srinivasan and the author then speculated about whether an animals structural protein,
such as collagen, which contains the peptide bond as the repeating unit along the chain, would
also respond to the ultraviolet laser pulses. They knew that when skin was incised with a sharp
blade, the wound would heal without brosis and, hence, no scar tissue. Conceivably, living skin
257
or other tissue, when incised by irradiation

from a pulsed ultraviolet light source,
would also heal without brosis and
scarring.
Physics of Ablation
Fig. 1.
Three scanning electron micrographs of laserirradiated turkey cartilage, recorded from different perspectives
and with different magnication. In the bottom micrograph, arrows
indicate the regions irradiated with 193-nm light and 532-nm light.
For each wavelength, the uence/pulse and number of pulses of
irradiation are given.
Ablation occurs when the laser uence is

such that the energy deposited in a volume
of tissue is sufcient to break the chemical
and physical bonds holding the tissue together producing a gas that is under high
pressure. The gas then expands away from
the irradiated surface, carrying with it
most of the energy that was deposited into
the volume that absorbed the energy. If the
absorption depth is sufciently shallow
and the pulse duration is sufciently short,
the expanding gas can escape from the
surface in a time that is short compared
with thermal diffusion times, leaving a
clean incision with minimal collateral
damage. These conditions are readily satised by a short pulse of short-wavelength
light having sufcient energy/unit area,
given that protein and lipids are very
strong absorbers of ultraviolet light.
Next Steps
To develop practical innovative applications, Srinivasan, Blum, and the author

needed to collaborate with medical/surgical
professionals. To interest these professionals, they etched a single human hair by
a succession of 193-nm ArF excimer laser
pulses, producing an SEM micrograph
(Fig. 2), showing 50-m-wide laser-etched
notches.
While IBM was preparing a patent
application, Srinivasan, Blum, and the
author were constrained from discussing
their discovery with people outside IBM.
Fig. 2. Scanning electron micrograph of a human hair etched
by irradiation with an ArF excimer laser; the notches are 50 m wide.
But a newly hired IBM colleague, Ralph
Linkser, with an M.D. and a Ph.D. in
physics, obtained fresh arterial tissue from a cadaver, and Linsker, Srinivasan, Blum, and the author
irradiated a segment of aorta with both 193-nm light from the ArF excimer laser and 532-nm light from
the Q-switched, frequency-doubled Nd:YAG laser. Once again the morphology of the tissue adjacent to
the irradiated/incised regions, examined by standard tissue pathology techniques (Fig. 3), was
stunningly different, with irradiation by the 193-nm light showing no evidence of thermal damage
to the underlying and adjacent tissue [3].
258
This experimental study on freshly

excised human tissue conrmed that excimer laser surgery removed tissue by a
fundamentally new process. Srinivasan,
Blum, and the authors visionthat excimer laser surgery would allow tissue to
be incised so cleanly that subsequent
healing would not produce scar tissue
was more than plausible; it was likely,
subject to experimental verication on
live animals.
First Public Disclosure

After their patent application was led,
Srinivasan, Blum, and the author submitted a paper to Science magazine. Their
paper was rejected because one of the
referees argued that irradiation with farultraviolet radiation (far-UV) would be
carcinogenic, making the technique more
harmful than benecial. Since Srinivasan
had been invited to speak about his work
on polymers at the upcoming CLEO 1983
conference co-sponsored by the OSA,
Srinivasan, Blum, and the author wanted
to get a publication into print as soon as
possible. Therefore, they resubmitted their
paper to Laser Focus, including some
Fig. 3. Left side: Photo micrographs of human aorta
remarks about the new experiments on
irradiated by 1000 pulses of ArF excimer laser 193-nm light; lower
image is a magnied view of the right-hand side of the laserhuman aorta, and the Laser Focus issue
irradiated region. Right side: Photo micrographs of human aorta
containing their paper [4] was pubirradiated by 1000 pulses of Q-switched, frequency-doubled
lished simultaneously with CLEO 1983.
Nd:YAG laser 532-nm light; lower image is a magnied view of
Srinivasans talk on 20 May, entitled
the right-hand side of the laser-irradiated region. (By permission
Ablative photodecomposition of organic
of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
polymer lms by far-UV excimer laser
radiation, included the rst public disclosure that the excimer laser cleanly ablated biological
specimens, as well as organic polymers.
From Excimer Laser Surgery to ArF Excimer

Laser-based Refractive Surgery
At that very same CLEO 1983 meeting, Stephen Trokel and Francis LEsperance, two renowned
ophthalmologists, gave invited talks on applications of infrared lasers to ophthalmic surgery. The
author attended both of their talks and was amazed at the results they obtained in successfully treating
two very different ophthalmic conditions that were not candidates for excimer laser treatment.
However, Trokel knew of ophthalmic conditions, such as myopia, that could be corrected by modifying
the corneal curvature. A treatment known as radial keratotomy (RK) corrected myopia by using a cold
steel scalpel to make radial incisions at the periphery of the cornea. Upon healing, the curvature of the
front surface of the cornea was reduced, thereby reducing myopia. While this technique rarely yielded
259
uncorrected visual acuity of 20/20, the patients myopia was denitely reduced. One serious drawback
of RK was that the depth of the radial incisions left the cornea mechanically less robust. The healed eye
was more susceptible to fracture under impact, such as might occur during an automobile collision.
Trokel speculated that the excimer laser might be a better scalpel for creating the RK incisions.
Upon learning of Srinivasan, Blum, and the authors discovery of excimer laser surgery, Trokel,
who was afliated with Columbia Universitys Harkness Eye Center in New York City, contacted
Srinivasan and brought enucleated calf eyes (derived from slaughter) to the Watson Research Center on
20 July 1983. Srinivasans technical assistant, Bodil Braren, participated in an experiment using the ArF
excimer laser to precisely etch the corneal epithelial layer and stroma of these calf eyes. The published
report of this study is routinely referred to by the ophthalmic community as the seminal paper in laser
refractive surgery [5].
To conduct studies on live animals, the experiments were moved to Columbias laboratories. Such
experiments were necessary to convince the medical community that living cornea etched by the ArF
excimer laser does not form scar tissue at the newly created surface and the etched volume is not lled in
by new growth. The rst experiment on a live rabbit in November 1983 showed excellent results in
that, after a week of observation, the cornea was not only free from any scar tissue but the depression
had not lled in. Further histological examination of the etched surface at high magnication showed
an interface free from detectable damage.
LEsperance, also afliated with Columbia, thought beyond RK and led a patent application
describing the use of excimer laser ablation to modify the curvature of the cornea by selectively
removing tissue from the front surface, not the periphery of the cornea. His U.S. patent 4,665,913 [6]
specically describes this process, which was later named photorefractive keratectomy (PRK).
Soon ophthalmologists around the world, who knew of the remarkable healing properties of the
cornea, were at work exploring different ways to use to excimer lasers to reshape the cornea. From live
animal experiments, they moved to enucleated human eyes, then to blind eyes of volunteers, where they
could study the healing. Finally, in 1988, a sighted human was treated with PRK and, after the cornea
had healed by epithelialization, this patients myopia was corrected.
Development of an alternative technique, known as laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) commenced in 1987. In LASIK, a separate tool is used to create a hinged ap at the front of the cornea,
preserving the epithelial layer and exposing underlying stroma, which is then irradiated and reshaped
by the ArF excimer laser. After such irradiation, the ap is repositioned over the irradiated area, it
adheres rather quickly, and the patient is soon permitted to blink, while the surgeon makes sure that the
ap stays in place. No sutures are required. The ap acts like the corneas own bandaid, minimizing
the discomfort of blinking. LASIK offers the patient much less discomfort than PRK and much more
rapid attainment of ultimate visual acuity following surgery. For these reasons patients prefer LASIK to
PRK, and far more LASIK procedures are performed than PRK procedures.
However, patients whose corneas are much thinner than average are not good candidates for
LASIK, because a post-LASIK cornea is mechanically weaker than a post-PRK cornea, making the
cornea more susceptible to impact or high-acceleration injury. In fact, the U.S. Navy accepts candidates
into training programs for the Naval Air Force who had their visual acuity improved by PRK, but it
does not accept candidates who had LASIK.
Pervasiveness of Laser Refractive Surgery

Since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted approval to manufacturers of laser
refractive surgery systems in 1995, more than 30 million patients have undergone the procedure to
improve their eyesight. While patients choose to undergo this procedure for the obvious cosmetic
reasons, many patients are unable to comfortably wear contact lenses. PRK and LASIK offer them a safe
alternative that actually may cost less than the accumulated cost of wearing and maintaining contact
lenses. Further, the U.S. military encourages its ground troops to have laser refractive surgery to
eliminate the problems inherent in wearing glasses or contact lenses in combat situations (e.g., the desert
sands of the Middle East). Laser refractive surgery can restore visual acuity to better than 20/20 as is
260
required for certain aviators. With further renements in so-called custom wavefront-guided laser
refractive surgery, soon there may be a time when patients undergoing laser refractive surgery may
expect to achieve visual acuity of 20/10.
Public awareness and interest in laser eye surgery was intense even before FDA approval. On 30
January 1987, The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled Laser shaping of cornea shows
promise at correcting eyesight, and on 29 September 1988, The New York Times published its rst
article on PRK, entitled Laser may one day avert the need for eyeglasses. Subsequent articles in the
press dealt with the progress in the research on PRK, the formation of three U.S. companies to market
this procedure and approval by the FDA in 1995. At this point, the surgical procedure was discussed at
length in all the popular media, including The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle,
Newsweek, and The New York Magazine. On 11 October 1999, Time magazine published a cover
story entitled The laser x.
In August 1998, The National Academy of Sciences issued a pamphlet entitled Preserving the
Miracle of Sight: Lasers and Eye Surgery, the stated purpose of which was to show The Path from
Research to Human Benet. One section describes the rst experiments that were done at IBM
Research and, subsequently, at Columbia University, leading to the development of PRK [7].
As for the size of the business of laser refractive surgery, at a typical cost of $2000/procedure,
patients have spent more than $90 billion on PRK and LASIK through the end of 2012.
Srinivasan, Blum, and the author opened the door to this revolution in eye care through their
seminal discovery and subsequent transfer of the technology to the medical/surgical profession. The
OSA presented this group with the R. W. Wood Prize in 2004 for the discovery of pulsed ultraviolet
laser surgery, wherein laser light cuts and etches biological tissue by photoablation with minimal
collateral damage, leading to healing without signicant scarring. In 2013, Srinivasan, Blum, and the
author received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama and the Fritz
J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize from the National Academy of Engineering.
References
1. R. Srinivasan and V. Mayne-Banton, Self-developing photoetching of poly(ethylene terephthalate)
lms by far-ultraviolet excimer laser radiation, Appl. Phys. Lett. 41, 576578 (1982).
2. R. Srinivasan and W. J. Leigh, Ablative photodecomposition: the action of far-ultraviolet (193 nm)
laser radiation on poly(ethylene terephthalate) lms, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 104, 67846785 (1982).
3. R. Linsker, R. Srinivasan, J. J. Wynne, and D. R. Alonso, Far-ultraviolet laser ablation of
atherosclerotic lesions, Lasers Surg. Med. 4, 201206 (1984).
4. R. Srinivasan, J. J. Wynne, and S. E. Blum, Far-UV photoetching of organic material, Laser Focus 19,
6266 (1983).
5. S. L. Trokel, R. Srinivasan, and B. Braren, Excimer laser surgery of the cornea, Am. J. Ophthalmol.
96, 710715 (1983).
6. F. A. LEsperance, Jr., Method for ophthalmological surgery, U.S. patent 4,665,913 (19 May 1987).
7. R. Conlan, Preserving the miracle of sight: lasers and eye surgery, in Beyond Discovery: The Path from
Research to Human Benet (National Academy of Sciences, 1998). http://www.nasonline.org/
publications/beyond-discovery/miracle-of-sight.pdf.
261
19751990
Intraocular Lenses: A More

Permanent Alternative
Ian Cox
efore the 1950s, cataracts, a loss of transparency of the human lens causing blindness, had
been treated using procedures such as couching and various forms of intra- and
extracapsular lens extraction (ICCE, ECCE). Minimizing surgical complications and
attaining good postoperative vision were the primary goals of the surgery. Correction of postoperative aphakia with spectacles was less than satisfactory for patients; their quality of vision
was impacted by the magnication, visual aberrations, and eld loss inherent in the highpowered positive lenses required to correct the post-surgical eye. Contact lenses provided a
superior optical alternative to spectacles, but mobility in the elderly patients typically undergoing
cataract surgery was a real problem, as contact lenses needed to be inserted and removed
every day.
Sir Harold Ridley (Fig. 1) is universally accepted as the father of intraocular lenses (IOL).
He was the rst to conceptualize a lens that could be surgically implanted in the eye to
compensate for the loss of optical power that occurs when the cataractous lens is removed.
Noting that ghter pilots injured during the early years of World War II with Plexiglass splinters
permanently lodged in their eyes showed no adverse responses, he designed a polymethyl
methacrylate (PMMA) optic to replace the cataractous lens in the eye. In 1949 he performed
the rst surgery to implant a plexiglass intraocular lens. Although the prescription was far from
ideal due to errors in the calculation of the refractive index of the natural lens, the surgery was
considered a success [1]. Ridley IOLs were used in hundreds of similar surgeries over the next
decade, with successful outcomes reported in about 70% of cases. Difculties in maintaining the
lens location in the posterior chamber of the eye and centered on the pupil were the main causes
of failure. Amazingly, although a small number of visionary surgeons followed Ridleys lead in
the use of intraocular lenses to correct for cataract extraction, it would not be until the late 1980s
before it became the preferred method of correction.
From the 1950s through the 1980s, the history of IOL development would be a leapfrogging of technologies in the placement of the IOL in the eye, IOL mechanical design, surgical
technique, and diagnostic equipment for measuring the intraocular length of the eye. During this
period the lens material of choice was PMMA, with rigid metal or PMMA haptics requiring a
large incision size, polypropolene haptics being introduced to help with centering the lens as the
capsular bag collapsed during the healing process [2].
In 1984, the rst silicone IOL lens, designed by Marzocco and introduced by STAAR, was
brought to the marketplace. The huge advantage of this exible lens was that it could be
introduced through the incision into the eye in a folded conguration, allowing a decrease in the
surgical incision size. The incision length is related to the induction of post-surgical corneal
astigmatism [3], so this signaled the beginning of a drive toward smaller incision sizes that
continues to this day. Ridleys original incision was essentially the full diameter of the cornea,
while today incisions can be as small as 2 mm, using a dedicated injector to fold and introduce the
lens through the incision. It was not until the early 2000s that convergence of these technologies
brought a standard of procedure that is the norm in the United States even today [2]. This
involves a cataract extraction in the capsule via phacoemulsication under topical intracameral
anasthesia. The replacement IOL is a exible, one-piece lens with a square posterior edge
262
(to reduce posterior capsule opacication),

introduced through a 3.0-mm or smaller
incision in the cornea and placed fully
within the capsular bag, with a slight vault
against the posterior surface of the capsule.
Having spent 50 years developing this
procedure to be the preferred option for all
cataract surgeries, even in children, the
industry moved its sights to optimizing the
optical performance of IOLs. In 1989
David Atchison identied the considerable
increase in spherical aberration created by
removing the natural lens and recommended spherical surfaced lens forms that
would correct the majority of this aberration [4]. He followed this with the suggestion that using aspheric surfaces would not
be benecial, due to the aberrations induced by tilt and decentration of the nal
IOL after healing. Not to be deterred,
Antonio Guirao and several colleagues,
including Pablo Artal and Sverker Norrby,
measured the image quality of the normal
population with age and then of the typical
psuedophakic population. Led by Norrby,
an IOL was developed to correct the average spherical aberration of the post-surgical IOL implanted eye. The lens, released
Fig. 1. Sir Harold Ridley, universally accepted as the father
to the market by Abbott Medical Optics
of IOLs, being the rst to devise, produce, and implant the
rst PMMA IOL. ( National Portrait Gallery, London. Sir
(AMO) as the TecnisIOL, was designed
(Nicholas) Harold Lloyd Ridley by Bassano Ltd., half-plate lm
with an aspheric anterior lens surface and
negative, 19 May 1972, NPG x171529.)
consideration of the typical decentrations
that occur with IOL surgical placement
and postoperative healing. A rapid response from Alcon provided lenses that corrected a portion of
the spherical aberration of the eye and IOL in combination, and Bausch and Lomb provided a spherical
aberration-free IOL design, ignoring the spherical aberration inherent in the aphakic eye. All three
lenses met with successful use by surgeons around the world, the more technology minded exploring the
concept of using all three lenses along with Zernike analysis of corneal topography measurements to
determine which lens would come closest to nullifying the spherical aberration of an individual eye.
The next challenge was correcting near vision in the pseudophakic eye, which of course, has no
accommodation after removal of the natural lens. Early attempts at multizonal IOLs for correcting
presbyopia demonstrated marginal success due to poor image quality and led to withdrawal from the
market by the early 1990s, but in 1997 AMO released a simultaneous refractive multifocal lens
(distance, intermediate, and near zones of the design were within the patients pupil under normal
illumination) that gained traction in the marketplace until the early 2000s, when complaints of reduced
contrast and halos at night led to a reduction in use [2]. About this time Alcon introduced a diffractive
bifocal IOL design, based on patents bought from 3M but updated with a smaller optic zone (only the
central 3.6 mm encapsulated the bifocal diffractive element) and an apodized energy prole. The lens
had greatest near power at the center of the pupil (equal distance and near), and a shift biased toward
distance power moving from the center to the periphery of the optic zone, with all light focused at
distance outside the 3.6-mm central diffractive zone. Under its marketed name of ReSTOR, this product
met with great enthusiasm when presented to clinicians and continues to grow in popularity, especially
in the latest version, which has a lower add power (reduced from +4 D in the original design to +3 D).
263
AMO responded with a modied refractive multifocal marketed as the ReZoom in 2005, and then
released a diffractive design in 2010, which was similar to the Alcon product, without the apodization
feature. Although these types of designs are generally successful, some patients do experience reduced
contrast, ghosting, and doubling with large pupil sizes, particularly in lenses that are decentered relative
to the center of the pupil, as one might expect with designs of this type.
Stuart Cummings, a surgeon, observed in 1989 that patients who had plate haptic silicone IOLs
inserted often showed better near reading performance than those tted with other conventional loop
haptic IOL designs, leading him to invent a lens specically designed to optimize this feature. By adding
a weakened portion or hinge to the plate haptic, the silicone lens was designed to bend under the
intraocular forces occurring with ciliary muscle contraction during accommodation. In this way, the
optics of the lens were traditional monofocal spherical surfaces, but good image quality could be
provided at both distance and near as the optic of the lens moved forward with the accommodative
response. Brought to the market under the tradename Crystalens in 2005, this lens was the rst, and is
still the only, IOL to have the claim approved by the FDA that it demonstrates accommodation of up
to 1 D. The exact mechanism of action has not been veried, but it is most probably a combination of
optic displacement, optic tilt, and optic zone distortion brought about by the accommodative forces of
the eye increasing the depth of eld. Regardless of the mechanism, clinical studies have shown superior
near vision over monofocal lenses, while maintaining equivalent distance visual acuity.
Correction of postoperative astigmatism induced by surgery was always an issue with cataract
surgery, as large incisions closed by sutures led to signicant changes in corneal topography [3].
Typically these changes would be corrected by progressive spectacles worn by the pseudophakic patient
postoperatively. However, the acceptance of multifocal IOLs through the 2000s in conjunction with
small, sutureless incision sizes led to an expectation from many patients that they could spend most of
their waking hours without a distance spectacle correction. This paradigm opened the demand for toric
IOLs in those patients who had signicant corneal astigmatism prior to cataract surgery. Although
offered to the industry in 1994 by STAAR on their plate silicone lens platform, signicant adoption of
toric IOLs only began with the introduction of the Acrysof Toric IOL by Alcon in 2005. Although
optically the design is straightforward, a successful toric IOL must demonstrate stability of the cylinder
axis from lens placement at the time of surgery until complete healing 3 to 6 months postoperatively.
This lens, along with competitor offerings, typically shows stability that makes the use of toric lenses a
benet in eyes with 1.25 D of astigmatism or greater postoperatively.
IOLs have come a long way since their beginnings in 1949, and today they are the preferred method
of correction following cataract surgery regardless of patient age or refractive status.
References
1. H. Ridley, Intra-ocular acrylic lensespast, present and future, Trans. Ophthalmol. Soc. UK 84(5),
514 (1964).
2. J. A. Davison, G. Kleinmann, and D. J. Apple, Intraocular lenses, Chap. 11 in Duanes
Ophthalmology (CD-ROM), W. Tasman and E. A. Jaeger, eds. (Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2006).
3. K. Hayashi, H. Hayashi, F. Nakao, and F. Hayashi, The correlation between incision size and corneal
shape changes in sutureless cataract surgery, Ophthalmology 102, 550556 (1995).
4. D. A. Atchison, Optical design of intraocular lenses. I. On-axis performance, Optom. Vis. Sci. 66,
492506 (1995).
264
19751990
Spectacles: Past, Present,

and Future
William Charman
pectacles probably have a longer history than any other optical device, apart from
magniers, and their development has continued throughout the era of The Optical
Society (OSA). A fascinating aspect of this history is that spectacle lens design and
technology involve not only optical solutions to the visual needs of the wearer but also
considerations of comfort, fashion, and appearance. In particular, the diameter of lens required
to t any frame may put serious constraints on the optical characteristics of the lens.
The optics of the human eye should form an image of the outside world on the light-sensitive
retina. Since objects of interest may lie anywhere between distant and relatively close distances of
the order of arms length or less, either the depth of focus of the eye must be very large or, more
realistically in view of the eyes relatively large maximal numerical aperture, 0.25, an active
focusing mechanism is required. Focusing is achieved by active changes in the shape of the elastic
crystalline lens, a process known as accommodation. With accommodation relaxed, the eye
ought to be focused for distance, when it is called emmetropic.
Unfortunately, our evolutionary development has left us with two problems. First, the ocular
dioptics may not form a sharply focused image of distant objects, so that the eye suffers from
ametropia. If the optics are too powerful, the image lies in front of the retina, and the eye is
myopic (short-sighted); if too weak, the image lies behind the retina and the eye is hyperopic
(often erroneously called long-sighted). Evidently the myopic eye can focus clearly on near
objects and the hyperopic eye may be able to increase its power by accommodation to focus both
distant and some near objects. The second problem is that while accommodation was adequate
to the needs of our short-lived ancestors, most of us are now living too long for accommodation
to remain effective in the later part of life. The objective amplitude of accommodation (i.e., the
maximum change in ocular power) for each of us declines steadily from the early teenage years to
reach zero at about 50, when the individual becomes fully presbyopic. Thus, older uncorrected
emmetropes and hyperopes inevitably have poor near vision, although myopes have less
difculty. Almost all older individuals need some form of optical assistance if they are to see
both distant and near objects clearly, the only exceptions being a few happy anisometropic
individuals, having one near-emmetropic eye and one mildly myopic eye.
By 1916, at the time when the OSA was founded, basic spectacle lens design was reasonably
well understood. A variety of types of bifocals were available, including the fused form, where the
bifocal near segment was made of int glass and the distance carrier was made of crown so that
the add effect could be obtained with a lens having no surface discontinuities. Prisms had been
introduced by Von Graefe and Donders to help those with convergence problems. Tints of
various colors and transmittances were available (indeed, as early as Christmas Eve 1666, the
great diarist Samuel Pepys was writing I did buy me a pair of green spectacles, to see whether
they will help my eyes or no). After seven centuries of development, could spectacle lenses be
improved further?
Spectacle lens design and the materials used have, in fact, advanced to a surprising degree
during the OSA century. The earliest relevant paper in the OSAs brave new agship
publication, Journal of The Optical Society of America, appeared in the rst volume under
the title The reected images in spectacle lenses [1]. These reections may interfere with the
265
wearers vision but are generally considered to be most important from the cosmetic point of view. Since
for normal incidence the reectance at the surface of a lens of refractive index n is (n1)2/(n+1)2, the
problem increases as the lens index is raised. Single-layer and multi-layer coatings have, in recent
decades, provided a solution, but questions remain on the optimal coating characteristics, since under
conditions of spectacle use ngerprints and other dirt may, on the lens, be more obvious on the coated
lens, and regular cleaning is required. It is, incidentally, of interest that as late as 1938 Tillyer, in a
discussion on optical glasses given at an OSA symposium on optical materials, still thought it worth
commenting more light gets through the lens when it is tarnished slightlyan earlier, less controlled
form of lens coating!
The question of lens index is also, of course, of great importance in relation to lens thickness and the
consequent appearance of the spectacles when worn. Surface power is given by (n1)/r, where r is the
surface radius. Thus, for any required corrective power, the difference between the two surface
curvatures of a meniscus spectacle lens will be reduced if its index is increased. This means that a
positive lens can have smaller central thickness and a negative lens will have reduced edge thickness for
any given lens diameter. This is of particularly cosmetic value for high myopes wanting a frame that
demands a large lens diameter. Depending upon the material density, the weight of the thinner lens may
also be reduced. Thus, over recent decades there have been continuing and successful attempts to
produce materials of higher refractive index, in both glass and plastic. Whereas traditional crown and
int glasses had indices of 1.52 and 1.62, respectively, materials are now available with indices up to 1.9.
Refractive index and density are, however, not the only consideration with lens materials.
Dispersive characteristics are also important, since when directing the visual axis away from the lens
center the wearer is effectively looking through a prism, resulting in transverse chromatic aberration
and color fringing around objects. Thus, as well as having high index and low density, the ideal lens
material should have as high a constringence (Abbe number, V-Value) as possible. Currently glasses of
refractive index 1.8 have a constringence of about 35.
A major advance in materials was the appearance of plastic lenses. Although polyethyl methacrylate (PMMA, Plexiglass, Perspex) had been introduced before the second world war, it was relatively
soft and easily scratched. The breakthrough came with a wartime development, CR39, a polymerizable,
thermosetting plastic with a refractive index (1.498) similar to that of crown glass and a V-value of 58.
Importantly, it had better scratch resistance than PMMA, a high impact resistance, and half the density
of crown glass. The rst ophthalmic lenses in the material were produced by Armorlite in 1947. Lenses
can be either surfaced or molded. Demands for still higher impact resistance led to the introduction of
polycarbonate lenses in the late 1950s, rst for safety eyeware and later, as optical quality improved, for
all powers of ophthalmic lens. Polycarbonate is a thermoplastic, and lenses can again be made by either
molding or surfacing techniques. Its index (1.586) is a little higher than crown glass but its V-value (30)
is lower: since the scratch resistance is not high, the surface is usually protected by a hard coating, such
as thermally cured polysiloxane. The specic gravity and UV transmittance are low. Other higher index
plastics are now available. Various hard and anti-reection coatings can be applied to all these plastic
lenses, whose many attractive features have given them a dominant position in the spectacle market.
Ultimately gradient-index media may nd a role in spectacle lens design [2].
From the design point of view, the advent of computers has allowed the impact of aspherization
on the performance of single-vision lenses to be explored in considerable detail [3]. Such work has
revealed that aspherization widens the range of lens forms that yield zero oblique astigmatism as
compared to those lying on the Tscherning ellipse. Modern ray-tracing techniques have also greatly
beneted the design of progressive addition (varifocal) lenses. These are lenses for presbyopes in which
the discrete power zones of traditional bifocals and trifocals are replaced by a smooth variation in
power across the lens surface, from that appropriate for distance vision to that for near, with good
vision for intermediate distances between the distance and near zones and an absence of visible dividing
lines on the lens surface. First proposed by Aves in 1907, with his elephants trunk design, the rst
successful lenses of this type were the French Varilux designed by Maitenaz (Essilor) and, in the U.S., the
Omnifocal (Univis). Since then numerous variations have been produced. Optically, the challenge is
that the shorter the progressive corridor between stable distance and near corrections, the narrower the
corridor and the greater the unwanted astigmatism in neighboring lens areas (Fig. 1). Since the visual
266
axes converge during near vision, separate right and

left eye lenses are required. Moreover the ideal lens
depends on such factors as the extent to which the
individual patient moves the eyes or the head when
changing xation. Thus, the concept of customized lenses has been introduced, where details of
the design depend upon the characteristics of the
individual wearer and the frame used. The manufacture of such lenses is only possible through the recent
availability of digital surfacing or freeform technology. An obvious downside is that the advantages
of customization may be destroyed if the lenses are in
the incorrect position as a result of frame movement
or distortion.
While neutral and color-tinted lenses have been
Fig. 1. Zones of a progressive addition lens (PAL).
available for many centuries, with progressive reneThe distance D and near N zones are connected by a
ment in bulk, coated, or laminated forms, one striking
progressive intermediate zone (I). Areas of poor vision
innovation in the OSA era was the introduction, by
because of unwanted surface astigmatism are shown
by shading. (Reproduced with permission of [4].
Corning in the mid-1960s, of photochromic lenses.
Copyright 1993, The Optical Society.)
These actively change their transmittance in response
to the ambient light level, obviating additional prescription sunglasses. The original
glass-based photochromics relied on silver
halide, in which electron exchange under the
inuence of high levels of short-wavelength
light yielded opaque colloidal metallic silver.
The resultant loss in transmittance was
reversed when the light levels lowered, with
transition times of the order of a few minutes. Subsequent advances have resulted in
more stable lenses with shorter transition
times and photochromic plastics using
organic dyes.
One specialized area of spectacle use is
for low-vision patients, who require magnication for either distance or near tasks.
Ellerbrock [5] gave a valuable account of
the aids available at that time, and the
OSA later honored an outstanding practi Fig. 2. Louise Sloan receiving the Tillyer Medal in 1971.
tioner in the eld, Louise Sloan, by the
award of its Tillyer Medal in 1971 [6]
(Fig. 2). The question of whether wearers of bioptic spectacles, with their limitations on eld of view,
should be allowed to drive remains controversial. Press-on plastic Fresnel lenses and prisms have
found application in patients with binocular vision problems such as squint.
What does the future hold? One challenge is the search for a full-aperture lens of variable power for
the correction of presbyopia, so that the accommodational ability of the young eye can be mimicked.
While multi-lens zoom spectacles exist, their appearance makes them unacceptable to all except a
minority of presbyopes. Variable-power lenses with a uid reservoir enclosed by a exible membrane,
so that the surface curvature can be varied by pumping liquid in or out, have a long history but have so
far found only a limited market. Alvarez lenses, consisting of two closely spaced component lenses with
surfaces following a cubic equation that are translated laterally with respect to each other, have found
some application recently. Like membrane lenses they are difcult to incorporate into standard frames.
Possibly more promising are electrically switched devices, such as liquid-crystal refractive or diffractive
267
lenses, but the latter suffer from the problem of large amounts of transverse chromatic aberration.
The search continues.
Finally, there is continuing interest in the interaction of spectacles with the growth of the eye and
the development of refractive error. In recent decades the prevalence of myopia has increased,
particularly in many Asian countries, presumably associated with lifestyle changes for those involving
near work or outdoor activity. Can a childs wearing of suitable spectacles eliminate, or at least reduce,
these myopic changes? Animal experiments suggest that the axial length of the growing eye is affected
by lens wear and that peripheral as well as axial imagery are of importance. Thus current studies are
exploring the possible benecial effects of bifocal or other lenses to relieve accommodation demand and
lenses that modify the pattern of peripheral refraction.
Many spectacle challenges remain for future members of the OSA!
References
W. B. Rayton, The reected images in spectacle lenses, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 1(56), 137148 (1917).
S. P. Wu, E. Nihei, and Y. Koike, Large radial graded-index polymer, Appl. Opt. 35, 2832 (1996).
D. A. Atchison, Spectacle lens design: a review, Appl. Opt. 31, 35793585 (1992).
C. W. Fowler, Method for the design and simulation of progressive addition spectacle lenses, Appl.
Opt. 32, 41444146 (1993).
5. V. J. Ellerbrock, Report on survey of optical aids for subnormal vision, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 36, 679695
(1946).
6. L. L. Sloan, Optical magnication for subnormal vision: historical survey, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 62,
162168 (1972).
1.
2.
3.
4.
268
19751990
Major Milestones in Liquid Crystal

Display Development
Shin-Tson Wu
he earliest display of moving images was the motion picture projector, in which light
from a bright lamp was passed through an image on a lm that was then imaged onto a
screen. In the 1920s and 1930s the rst black and white television broadcasts were made
and viewed on small black-and-white cathode ray tube displays. Such a display was achieved by
writing a visible image on a phosphor screen with an electron beam. It required a vacuum tube
and high voltage electronics, yet it produced a reasonable image. Over time cathode ray tube
displays became larger and capable of color images. They also became very heavy, bulky, and
power hungry, though they had good color rendition. However, they were all there were, and the
industry developed color CRTs with screen sizes as large as 1 m in diagonal dimension.
Alternative displays were tried such as plasma screens (an array of tiny, energy-hungry plasmas
that excited special phosphors for each color that quickly were bleached by the UV in the plasma)
or micro-mirror scanner displays. However, all of these were supplanted by the advent of the
liquid crystal display, the LCD. Today these displays dominate the display marketplace due to
their ability to be used in all sizes, from as small as a wristwatch to over 2.8-m-diagonal television
screens. LCDs can be reective, requiring just ambient light to be viewed, transmissive, requiring
a backlight to enable viewing, or transreective, in which a pixel is split into reective and transmissive subpixels. In either case their advantages of light weight, lower energy demand, and
scalability have won LCDs a dominant place in todays display marketplace. This essay explores
how that happened.
Liquid crystal is a mesogenic phase existing between crystalline solid and isotropic liquid.
In 1888, Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer and German physicist Otto Lehmann discovered
such an anisotropic liquid crystal. However, in the early days only a few compounds with a
liquid crystal phase were available, and their melting points were quite high. Moreover, to
utilize its large optical anisotropy the liquid crystal has to be aligned and an external eld
applied. Before the optically transparent and electrically conductive indium-tin-oxide (ITO)
lm was available, an alternative way to align a liquid crystal was by applying a magnetic eld.
Therefore, in the rst few decades major research focused on magnetic-eld-induced molecular
reorientation effects. But the electromagnet required to align the liquid crystals was too bulky
to be practically useful. Then in the 1930s Russian scientist V. Fredericksz and colleagues
started to investigate the electro-optic effects in nematic liquid crystals. Some basic concepts
were formulated such as the Fredericksz transition threshold and order parameter, which
described the crystalline state of a liquid crystal. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dynamic behavior
of a liquid crystal cell subjected to an external force, such as a magnetic eld or electric eld,
was investigated by C. W. Oseen, F. C. Frank, J. L. Ericksen, and F. M. Leslie. These concepts
and models provided the foundation for the rapid development of the useful electro-optic
devices that followed.
In the 1960s, American scientists George Heilmeier, Richard Williams, and their colleagues at RCA (Radio Corporation of America) Labs developed the dynamic scattering
mode and demonstrated the rst LCD panel [1]. This opened a new era for electronic
displays. Heilmeier was credited with the invention of the LCD. In 2006, he received the
OSA Edwin H. Land Medal, and in 2009 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of
269
Fame. However, the dynamic scattering LCD, which utilized the electric-current-induced electrohydrodynamic effect, was intrinsically unstable. Also, its contrast ratio was poor and power
consumption was high. As a result, it had a short life and was ultimately abandoned as a practical
display technology.
In the 1970s, to overcome the instability, poor contrast ratio, and high operation voltage of the
dynamic scattering mode display, Martin Schadt and Wolfgang Helfrich, and James Fergason
independently, invented the twisted nematic (TN) effect and steered LCD in a new and productive
direction. TN is regarded as a major invention of the twentieth century. In 1998, James Fergason was
inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2008 Schadt, Helfrich, and Fergason received the
IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa medal in recognition of their outstanding contribution.
Also in the 1970s, a landmark equally important to TN was the development of stable liquid
crystals called cyanobiphenyls by George Grays group at Hull University [2]. Amazingly, these positive
dielectric anisotropy ( 15) materials are still being used in some wristwatches and calculators in
2016. Meanwhile, to obtain a uniform domain new liquid crystal alignment techniques were developed.
Among them, buffed polyimide deserves special mention because it enables large panel LCDs to be
fabricated. This technique is still commonly used in modern LCD fabrication lines. Liquid crystals need
a small pre-tilt angle (35) to guide their reorientation direction when activated by an electric eld.
Otherwise, different domains could be formed, which caused spatially inhomogeneous electro-optic
behaviors. In addition to TN, vertical alignment (VA) and in-plane switching (IPS) were invented in the
1970s. In TN and VA cells, the electric eld is in the longitudinal direction, while in an IPS cell the
electric eld is in the lateral direction, also called the fringing eld. These three modes form the bases of
modern LCD technologies. TN is used in notebook computers and personal TVs in some aircraft
because of its low cost and high transmittance; multi-domain VA is widely used in high-denition TVs
because of its unprecedented contrast ratio; and IPS is commonly used in mobile displays, such as
iPhones and iPads, because of its robustness to external mechanical pressure allowing use in touch
screens.
Another crucial development in the 1970s was the thin lm transistor liquid crystal display (TFT
LCD) led by Bernard Lechner at RCA and Peter Brodys group at Westinghouse. In 1972, a group at
Westinghouse led by A. G. Fisher demonstrated that a color TV could be made by integrating red (R),
green (G), and blue (B) spatial color lters with liquid crystal pixels as intensity modulators [3]. Each
color pixel was independently controlled by a TFT. This combination of TFT and LCD enabled high
information content and became the foundation of todays display industry. In 2011, three TFT
pioneersBernard Lechner, Peter Brody, and Fang-Chen Luoreceived the IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa
medal, and in 2012 Heilmeier, Helfrich, Schadt, and (the late) Brody received the prestigious National
Academy of Engineerings Charles Stark Draper Prize to recognize their engineering development of
LCD utilized in billions of consumer and professional devices.
The early TFTs developed by Brody and his colleagues were based on cadmium selenide (CdSe),
which was never commercialized because of high off-current and reliability issues. Today, most LCDs
use silicon TFTs: amorphous silicon for large panels [>10-in. (25 cm) diagonal], poly-silicon for smallto-medium panels such as iPhones/iPads, and single-crystal silicon for micro-displays. Recently, oxide
semiconductors, e.g., InGaZnO2 with mobility about 20 higher than that of amorphous silicon, have
been attempted in TFT LCDs by major display producers. The high mobility of oxide semiconductors
helps to shrink TFT feature size, which in turn leads to a larger aperture for higher backlight
throughput.
In the 1980s, passive matrix and active matrix addressed LCDs were pursued in parallel. In the
passive matrix camp, a new LC mode called super-twisted nematic (STN; twist angle >90) was
developed to steepen the voltage-dependent transmittance curve to increase information content.
However, the viewing angle, contrast ratio, and response time of STN are far from satisfactory. In
the active matrix camp, Seiko, Epson, and several Japanese display leaders invested heavily in active
matrix TFT-LCD production facilities. In the meantime, new high-resistivity uorinated liquid crystals
were developed; this technology is required for active matrix operation to avoid image ickering. After
nearly a decade of erce competition, active matrix outperformed passive matrix and is commonly used
in display products.
270
Figure 1 shows the device structure

(one color pixel consisting of three RGB
sub-pixels) of a TFT-LCD. LCD is a nonemissive display, so it requires a backlight
or edge light, such as a cold cathode uorescent lamp (CCFL) or a light-emittingdiode (LED) array. A thin liquid crystal
layer is sandwiched between the active
matrix substrate and color lter substrate,
functioning as a spatial light modulator.
Each sub-pixel is controlled by a TFT
switch.
An important advancement in the
1990s was wide-view technology. Liquid
crystal is a birefringent material, so its elec Fig. 1. Device structure of a color pixel of thin-lm-transistor
tro-optic property depends on the viewing
LCD.
direction. This problem gets worse as the
panel size increases. To widen the viewing
angle, two major approaches were undertaken: (1) multi-domain structure, e.g., four domains, and
(2) phase-compensation lms to reduce light leakage at oblique angles. To create four domains, zigzag
electrode patterns were used. The viewer sees the average effect from four domains with size around
100 m. Therefore, the viewing angle is widened dramatically. Once the viewing angle issue was overcome,
there was a huge movement toward producing large-panel LCDs by Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers,
in addition to those in Japan.
In the 2000s, in addition to large screen sizes and high resolution, LCD received two important
enhancements: LED backlights and touch panels. The traditional backlight was a CCFL. It has a
narrow green emission, but the red and blue are broad. As a result, some bluegreen and yellowred
emissions leak through the corresponding blue and red color lters, so that the color gamut is limited to
75%, similar to that of a CRT. To improve color saturation and reduce power consumption, two
types of LED backlight were considered: white LEDs and RGB LEDs. White light can be generated by
using a blue LED to excite yellow-emitting phosphors or combining RGB LEDs. The former approach
is quite efcient, but its yellow emission is quite broad. Consequently, the color gamut is also limited to
75%. The RGB approach greatly extends the color gamut to over 120%; however, it requires three
driving circuits for the RGB LEDs. Moreover, there is a so-called green gap in the LED industry. That
means there is limited choice for green LEDs in terms of color and efcacy. Both approaches were
utilized by some major LCD developers, but eventually white LEDs won out. Nowadays, beneting
from progress in the general lighting industry, the efcacy of white LEDs has exceeded 100 lm/W. The
touch-panel LCD was another important technological development in the 2000s. The Apple iPhone
and iPad are examples of touch-panel LCDs. Numerous touch technologies were developed, including
resistive, capacitive, surface acoustic wave, infrared, and optical.
In 2004, as a consequence of the rapid growth in the display industry, IEEE and OSA jointly
launched a new journal, called the Journal of Display Technology (JDT). The author served as the
founding editor-in-chief. The scope of JDT covers all aspects of display technologies, from understanding the basic science and engineering of devices, to device fabrication, system design, applications,
and human factors.
In the 2010s, major research and development focused on faster response time, more vivid colors,
higher resolution, larger panel sizes, curved displays, and lower power consumption. CRT is an
impulse-type display; once the high-energy electrons bombard phosphors, the emitted light decays
rapidly. Therefore, the displayed images do not remain at the viewers eye, which means the images are
clear. The only problem is that the frame rate should be fast enough (120 Hz) to minimize image
ickering. Unlike CRT, TFT-LCD is a holding-type display. Once the gate channel is open, the
incoming data signals charge the capacitor and stay there until the next frame comes. Therefore, TFTLCD is ideal for displaying static images, such as paintings. When displaying fast-moving objects, the
271
holding-type TFT LCD causes image blurs.

To suppress image blurring, we can increase the frame rate, blink the backlight
to make CRT-like impulses, and reduce the
LC response time, which is governed by
the visco-elastic coefcient of the LC material and the square of the cell gap. With
continued improvement in developing
low-viscosity LC materials and advanced
manufacturing technology to control the
cell gap at 3 m, the response time can be
as small as 4 ms.
Another issue for LCDs to overcome
is color. Most LCDs use single-chip white
LED backlighting: a blue InGaN LED to
pump a yellow phosphor (cerium-doped
yttrium aluminum garnet: Ce:YAG). This
approach is efcient and cost effective,
but its color gamut is 75% and cannot
faithfully reproduce the natural colors. Recently, quantum-dot (QD) LEDs are emerg Fig. 2. Simulated color gamut of the iPhone 6 and quantuming as a new backlight source. Resulting
dot-enhanced LCD.
from the quantum connement effect, a QD
LED exhibits high quantum efciency, narrow-emission linewidth (30 nm), and controllable emission peak wavelength. In
comparison with conventional backlight
solutions, QD backlight offers a wider color gamut. Figure 2 shows the simulated
color gamut of the iPhone 6 (which uses
white LED) and QD-enhanced LCD, whose
color gamut is over 115% NTSC in CIE
1931 color space [4].
Power consumption affects the battery
life of a mobile display and the electricity
bill of a LCD TV. To be eco-friendly,
Energy Star 6 sets the maximum power
consumption for a given display size regardless of which technology is used. Figure 3 shows the maximum power consumption of a display panel with 169
aspect ratio. For example, the maximum
Fig. 3. Maximum power consumption set by Energy Star 6.
power consumption of a 60-in. (1.52 m)
Aspect ratio: 169.
diagonal HDTV (resolution 1920 1080)
is 100 W. As the resolution density keeps
increasing, the TFT aperture ratio is reduced and power consumption is increased. To reduce power
consumption, several approaches can be considered, such as a more efcient LED backlight, backlight
recycling, a high-mobility oxide semiconductor to increase the TFT aperture ratio, and color sequential
display to remove spatial color lters.
In the past ve decades, we have witnessed the amazing progress of liquid crystal displays
from concept proof to widespread applications. The technology trend is to go with a thinner
prole, exibility and bendability, lighter weight, more vivid color, lower power consumption, and
lower cost.
272
References
1. M. Schadt, Milestone in the history of eld-effect liquid crystal displays and materials, Jpn. J. Appl.
Phys. 48, 03B001 (2009).
2. J. W. Goodby, The nanoscale engineering of nematic liquid crystals for displays, Liq. Cryst. 38,
13631387 (2011).
3. Y. Ishii, The world of liquid-crystal display TVspast, present, and future, J. Disp. Technol. 7,
351360 (2007).
4. Z. Luo, Y. Chen, and S. T. Wu, Wide color gamut LCD with a quantum dot backlight, Opt. Express
21, 2626926284 (2013).
273
PRE1940
19411959
19601974
19751990
1991PRESENT
1991-PRESENT
Introduction
Govind Agrawal
his section covers the 25-year period extending from 1990 to 2014. This period is often
referred to as the Information Age because of the advent of the Internet during the early
1990s. It is also the period during which computer technology became mature enough
that it became difcult to imagine life without a computer. These developments affected quite
dramatically both the eld of optics and The Optical Society devoted to serving it. The articles in
this section make an attempt to document the advances made during this recent period and how
they impacted the functioning of The Optical Society.
The most dramatic story of the 1990s is the exponential growth in the capacity of optical
communication networks, fueled by the advances such as wavelength division multiplexing
and erbium-doped ber ampliers. A set of three articles provides the sense of history of this
period. In the rst one, Jeff Hecht discusses the birth and growth of ber-optic communication
industry starting in 1970 when Corning rst announced the invention of the low-loss ber. In
the second of his articles, Jeff Hecht describes how the telecommunication industry grew so
rapidly during the 1990s that it led to a telecom bubble in the stock market that burst
eventually in 2001. In the third article, Rod Alferness, who was at the forefront of this
revolution taking place during the 1990s, provides his perspective on the evolution of optical
communication networks since 1990.
A set of six articles provides a avor of how the eld of optics is evolving in the twenty-rst
century. They cover diverse research areas ranging from integrated photonics to biomedical
optics to quantum information. The rst article by Radha Nagarajan focuses on the recent
advances in the area of integrated photonics that are behind the revival of the telecommunication
industry after bursting of the telecom bubble in 2001. It is followed by Phillip Russells article
on the new wave of microstructured optical bers. Russell was the rst one to make bers known
as photonic crystal and photonic bandgap bers. Here is your chance to hear the history from the
inventor himself.
The third article in this section, by Wayne Knox, covers the history of ultrafast laser
technology. Knox has been involved with ultrafast lasers for a long time and knows their history
well. The fourth article is devoted to advances in biomedical optics. Greg Faris describes in this
article both the in vivo and in vitro applications made possible by recent advances in the area of
biomedical optics. In the next article, David Hagan and Steven Moss focus on novel optical
materials that are likely to revolutionize the twenty-rst century. The last article by Carlton
Caves is devoted to the history of the emerging eld of quantum information.
It was difcult to choose among a wide range of topics, and many could not be included
because of space limitations, among other things. It is my hope that the reader will gain an
appreciation of how the eld of optics is evolving during the twenty-rst century.
277
1991-PRESENT
Birth and Growth of the Fiber-Optic

Communications Industry
Jeff Hecht
iber-optic communications was born at a time when the telecommunications industry had
grown cautious and conservative after making telephone service ubiquitous in the United
States and widely available in other developed countries. The backbones of the longdistance telephone network were chains of microwave relay towers, which engineers had planned
to replace by buried pipelines carrying millimeter waves in the 60-GHz range, starting in the
1970s. Bell Telephone Laboratories were quick to begin research on optical communications
after the invention of the laser, but they spent the 1960s studying beam transmission through
buried hollow confocal waveguides, expecting laser communications to be the next generation
after the millimeter waveguide, on a technology timetable spanning decades.
Cornings invention of the low-loss ber in 1970 changed all that. Bell abandoned the
hollow optical guide in 1972 and never put any millimeter waveguide into commercial service
after completing a eld test in the mid-1970s. But telephone engineers remained wary of
installing ber without exhaustive tests and eld trials. Bell engineers developed and exhaustively
tested the rst generation of ber-optic systems, based on multimode graded-index bers
transmitting 45 Mb/s at 850 nm over spans of 10 km, connecting local telephone central ofces.
Deployment began slowly in the late 1970s, and soon a second ber window opened at 1300 nm,
allowing a doubling of speed and transmission distance. In 1980, AT&T announced plans to
extend multimode ber into its long-haul network, by laying a 144-ber cable between Boston
and Washington with repeaters spaced every 7 km along an existing right of way.
Yet by then change was accelerating in the no-longer stodgy telecommunications industry.
Two crucial choices in system design and the breakup of AT&T were about to launch the
modern ber-optic communications industry. In 1980, Bell Labs announced that the next
generation of transoceanic telephone cables would use single-mode ber instead of the copper
coaxial cables used since the rst transatlantic phone cable in 1956. In 1982, the upstart MCI
Communications picked single-mode ber as the backbone of its new North American longdistance phone network, replacing the microwave towers that gave the company its original
name, Microwave Communications Inc. That same year, AT&T agreed to divest its seven
regional telephone companies to focus on long-distance service, computing, and communications hardware.
The submarine ber decision was a bold bet on a new technology based on desperation.
Regulators had barred AT&T from operating communication satellites since the mid-1960s.
Coax had reached its practical limit for intercontinental cables. Only single-mode ber transmitting at 1310 nm could transmit 280 Mb/s through 50-km spans stretching more than
6000 km across the Atlantic. AT&T and its partners British Telecom and France Telecom set
a target of 1988 for installing TAT-8, the rst transatlantic ber cable. More submarine ber
cables would follow.
In 1982, MCI went looking for new technology to upgrade its long-distance phone network.
Visits to British Telecom Research Labs and Japanese equipment makers convinced them that
single-mode ber transmitting 400 Mb/s at 1310 nm was ready for installation. AT&T and
Sprint soon followed, with Sprint ads promoting the new ber technology by claiming that callers
could hear a pin drop over it.
278
Fueled by the breakup of AT&T and intense competition for long-distance telephone service, ber
sales boomed as new long-haul networks were installed, then slumped briey after their completion.
The switch to single-mode ber opened the room to further system improvements. By 1987,
terrestrial long-distance backbone systems were carrying 800 Mb/s, and systems able to transmit 1.7
Gb/s were in development. Long-distance trafc increased as competition reduced long-distance rates,
and developers pushed for the next transmission milestone of 2.5 Gb/s. Telecommunications was
becoming an important part of the laser and optics market, pushing development of products including
diode lasers, receivers, and optical connectors.
Fiber optics had shifted the telephone industry into overdrive. Two more technological revolutions
in their early stages in the late 1980s would soon shift telecommunications to warp speed. One came
from the optical world, the ber amplier. The other came from telecommunicationsthe Internet.
Even in the late 1980s, the bulk of telecommunications trafc consisted of telephone conversations.
(Cable television networks carried analog signals and were separate from the usual world of
telecommunications.) Telephony was a mature industry, with trafc volume growing about 10% a
year. Fiber trafc was increasing faster than that because ber was displacing older technologies
including microwave relays and geosynchronous communication satellites. Telecommunications networks also carried some digital data, but the overall volume was small.
The ideas that laid the groundwork for the Internet date back to the late 1960s. Universities began
installing terminals so students and faculty could access mainframe computers, ARPANET began
operations to connect universities, and telephone companies envisioned linking home users to mainframes through telephone wiring. Special terminals were hooked to television screens for early home
information services called videotex. But those data services attracted few customers, and data trafc
remained limited until the spread of personal computers in the 1980s.
The rst personal computer modems sent 300 bits/s through phone lines, a number that soon rose
to 1200 bits/s. Initially the Internet was limited to academic and government users, so other PC users
accessed private networks such as CompuServe and America Online, but private Internet accounts
became available by 1990. The World Wide Web was launched in 1991 at the European Center for
Nuclear Research (CERN) and initially grew slowly. But in 1994 the number of servers soared from 500
to 10,000, and the data oodgates were loosed. Digital trafc soared.
By good fortune, the global ber-optic backbone network was already in place as data trafc
started to soar. Construction expenses are a major part of network costs, so multi-ber cables were laid
that in the mid-1980s were thought to be adequate to support many years of normal trafc growth.
That kept the Information Superhighway from becoming a global trafc jam as data trafc took off.
The impact of ber is evident in Fig. 1, a chart presented by Donald Keck during his 2011 CLEO
plenary talk. Diverse new technologies had increased data transmission rates since 1850. Fiber optics
became the dominant technology after 1980 and is responsible for the change in slope of the data-rate
growth.
Fig. 1.
Increase in the data

transmission rate from 1850 to
2011 in response to diverse
technologies. Fiber optics
became the dominant
technology after 1980. Note the
change in slope around that
time. (Courtesy of Corning
Incorporated.)
279
Even more fortunately, Internet trafc was growing in phase with the development of a vital new
optical technology, the optical ber amplier. Early efforts to develop all-optical ampliers focused
on semiconductor sources, because they could be easily matched to signal wavelengths, but experiments in the middle to late 1980s found high noise levels. Attention turned to ber ampliers
after David Payne demonstrated the rst erbium-doped ber amplier in 1987. (See Digonnets
chapter on p. 195.)
Elias Snitzer had demonstrated a neodymium-doped optical amplier at American Optical in 1964,
but it had not caught on because it required ashlamp pumping. Erbium was the right material at the
right time. Its gain band fell in the 1550-nm window where optical bers have minimum attenuation.
Within a couple of years, British Telecom Labs had identied a diode-laser pump band at 980 nm and
Snitzer, then at Polaroid, had found another at 1480 nm. By 1989, diode-pumped ber ampliers
looked like good replacements for cumbersome electro-optic repeaters.
What launched the bandwidth revolution was the ability of ber ampliers to handle wavelengthdivision multiplexed signals. The rst tests started with only a few wavelengths and a single amplier;
then developers added more wavelengths and additional ampliers. The good news was that wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) multiplied capacity by the number of channels that could be
squeezed into the transmission band. The bad news was that WDM also multiplied the number of
potential complications.
Design of 1310-nm systems was straightforward because it required considering ber and amplier
performance at only one wavelength. WDM required balancing ber and amplier performance across
the usable spectrum, as well as dealing with other complications including crosstalk, combining signals
at the input, and separating them at the output. All posed optical challenges.
Both erbium-amplier gain and ber attenuation vary with wavelength, but communication
systems have to deliver the same power at all wavelengths. This meant developing ways to atten
amplier gain and ber attenuation along the system.
Chromatic dispersion became a challenge. The 1310-nm window was picked for early single-mode
systems because it was the zero-dispersion wavelength. Chromatic dispersion was high enough at
1550 nm to require ways to reduce it. Corning and British Telecom had developed ber with zero
dispersion shifted to 1550 nm in the 1980s, and that technology was used in early optical-amplier
cable systems transmitting at 1550 nm, including the TAT-12/13 transatlantic cable. However,
experiments showed a serious problem with WDM in dispersion-shifted bers. Signals at uniformly
spaced wavelengths remain in phase over long distances, causing four-wave mixing and crosstalk
exceeding system tolerances.
That problem led Corning to develop non-zero dispersion-shifted bers, which have enough
dispersion at 1550 nm to avoid four-wave mixing. However, the variation in dispersion across the
WDM range nonetheless required dispersion management to meet system dispersion tolerances as data
rates increased.
WDM also posed optical challenges. Systems required narrow-line lasers spaced evenly across the
spectrum, as well as optics to combine and separate the optical signals at the ends of the ber. That
required new types of optical lters with sharp cutoffs to slice the spectrum into the desired bands.
Through the 1990s, the bands grew narrower and narrower as designers sought to squeeze as many
channels as possible into the limited gain band of erbium-ber ampliers.
WDM, optical ampliers, and the Internet combined to give the young ber optics a big boost. In
1990, when the new technologies were still in the lab, Kessler Marketing Intelligence (now part of CRU
International) estimated that sales of cable, transceivers, and connectors in the United States were $948
million, up only 2% from the previous year in a slow economy. Sales overseas were comparable, so the
whole market was around $2 billion. Global sales of ber reached 6.74 million kilometers.
By 1995, when the optical amplier/WDM revolution was in full swing, the company estimated the
global ber-optic component market at $7.1 billion, with global ber sales more than tripling to 22.87
million kilometers. The web was in takeoff mode, and as the number of servers soared, Internet trafc
may have been doubling every three months, although few reliable numbers are available. Longdistance and international calling had grown with a decline in phone rates. Phone lines were humming
with faxes carrying documents that would have been sent by express carrier or mail in 1990.
280
That growth was a welcome boost for

optics as a whole. The wind-down of
Ronald Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative
had left many optickers out of work in
1990. Telecommunications companies in
need of optics specialists hired some of
them. Others went to work for fast-growing
rms building components or instruments
for the ber market, or started their own
companies. Figure 2 shows CRUs data on
ber sales in millions of kilometers, with
Chinese sales tracked separately, from 1980
to 2013. The trend in 1995 was clearly
upward.
At the postdeadline session of OFC
1996, a team from Fujitsu Laboratories in
Japan reported sending a record 1.1 Tb/s
through 150 km of ber, transmitting 20
Fig. 2. Total length (in millions of kilometers) of the optical
Gb/s on each of 55 channels, with erbiumber installed each year from 1980 through 2013, divided
ber ampliers on both transmitter and
between China and the rest of the world. (Courtesy of CRU
International, http://www.crugroup.com.)
receiver ends. Two other teams reported
reaching 1 Tb/s over shorter distances by
other means, one from AT&T Research
and Bell Laboratories and the second from
NTT. Fiber had become the key to delivering high bandwidth to a telecommunications industry convinced that you could
never have enough bandwidth. The future
looked bright.
In fact, as Fig. 2 shows, the light would
dim after the bubble burst in 2001. Sales
outside of China, little affected by the bubble, dropped from a peak of 80 million
kilometers in 2000 to a low of 43 million
kilometers in 2003. But then the light
brightened. CRU International reports that
growth returned outside of China, reaching
128 million kilometers in 2013. Chinas
aggressive modernization program brought
its ber sale to 123 million kilometers in
2013, just short of the rest of the world
Fig. 3. Cumulative installations of communications ber
combined. All told, as shown in Fig. 3,
around the world from 1980 through 2013. (Courtesy of CRU
CRU says that cumulative global installaInternational, http://www.crugroup.com.)
tion of optical ber for communications
through 2013 exceeds a staggering 2.1 billion kilometers. Optics now connects the world as the
backbone of the global telecommunications network.
Acknowledgment
Part of this material is adapted, with permission, from Jeff Hecht, City of Light: The Story of Fiber
Optics (Oxford, 2004).
281
1991-PRESENT
Telecommunications Bubble Pumps

Up the Optical Fiber Communications
Conference
Jeff Hecht
iber-optic ampliers and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) developed almost

perfectly in phase with the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s. The new optical
technology promised the bandwidth needed to carry fast-growing Internet trafc. Initially
the parallel advances of optical and Internet technology seemed an ideal match. Unfortunately,
that pairing ignited a speculative bubble that went out of control, creating trillions of dollars of
vastly inated stock valuation that vanished when the bubble collapsed.
An earlier chapter describes how ber became the backbone of the global telecommunications network. The roots of the Internet go back to the late 1960s, when low-loss bers were still
in development. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (then called ARPA)
began funding computer links among university and government laboratories.
A Changing Landscape in Telecommunications

Separately, telecom companies began experimenting with information services connecting home
consoles and television screens to mainframe computers through copper telephone lines. In the
1980s, personal computers became the preferred home connections to private services such as
CompuServe. Modem speeds carrying these services over phone lines rose from 300 baud in the
early 1980s to 56,000 baud in the 1990s.
Public Internet access began about 1989 and took off after the World Wide Web opened
the Internet to a wider range of services. In 1994, the Web grew from 500 to 10,000 servers,
and data trafc soared. For a brief, heady period in 1995 and 1996, the volume of Internet
data may have doubled every three months as hordes of new users explored the Web. Internet
trafc then was a small fraction of voice trafc (including faxes), but it was clear that if it
continued increasing at that rate it would soon eclipse voice trafc, which was growing about
10% a year.
The emergence of competition and the breakup of the old AT&T monopoly in 1984 had
already shaken the telephone industry. Once considered a natural monopoly, telephony had
become fragmented. Many competing carriers and the construction of new high-speed, highcapacity ber networks cut the prices of long-distance and international calls, greatly increasing
voice and fax trafc.
Competition also brought more subtle changes that would have a large impact. As a
monopoly AT&T published data on its trafc and system capacity to persuade regulators to
approve expansion plans. With deregulation and competition, that information became proprietary, and no carrier knew total network trafc or how fast its competitors were growing.
Meanwhile, new technology was expanding capacity of single-mode ber systems, which
had reached 2.5 Gb/s on the busiest routes by the mid-1990s. The rst WDM systems reached the
market in 1996. The same year saw installation of TAT-12 across the Atlantic, the rst
282
submarine cable with optical ampliers. WDM promised the bandwidth needed to cope with the
rapidly growing demand.
Yet in the new competitive environment, nobody knew exactly what that demand was. Traditional
phone network managers considered bandwidth a scarce commodity. Market analysts and the press
heralded the doubling of Internet trafc every 90 to 100 days. Soon the Federal Communications
Commission was citing the same numbers, although the original sourcea 1996 Worldcom report
was forgotten.
Few in the industry paid much attention in early 1998 when Andrew Odlyzko reported that AT&Ts
Internet trafc had only doubled during 1997. The dot-com boom was underway, and critical thinking
was not in fashion. Writers, business analysts, and stock promoters waxed exuberant about how the Web
would revolutionize the economy. With money readily available at low interest, investors poured money
into upstart web companies with little more than a handful of employees, a web site, andperhapsa
warehouse. As the new companies began to go public, their stock prices soared, pumping up the
technology-heavy NASDAQ index.
Investors began looking beyond the dot-coms to the telecommunications companies that
would provide vital infrastructure for the new economy. Fiber and optics companies were
particularly hot commodities because they offered breakthroughs in bandwidth. Investors soon
bordered on the euphoric about ber. Even hard-headed optical engineers decided that if investors
were going to throw money at anything optical, they might as well hold out their hats and catch
some of it. The boom brought a gold-rush atmosphere to the Optical Fiber Communications
Conference (OFC).
The Growth of OFC

OFC began as a small biennial topical meeting on optical ber transmission rst held in 1975. The
rst Optical Fiber Communications conference in 1979 had a small trade show and 1082
attendees. It went annual in 1981 and grew along with the ber industry. In 1986, when ber
had become the backbone of U.S. long-distance trafc, OFC drew 1801 people to Atlanta for the
technical sessions, plus 1071 exhibitors and 777 people who only visited the trade show of 150
companies occupying 27,100 square feet. It was the rst time more than half of OFC attendees
came only for the exhibits. Figure 1 shows how the number of attendees changed over a period
extending from 1979 to 2012.
A decade later at San Jose in 1996, only a few more people came for the technical session, but the
exhibits had more than doubled, to 2756 exhibit staff and 1990 exhibit-only visitors. Exhibit space had
increased over 50%, to 42,700 square feet. Fiber technology had come a long way, and WDM was
reaching the market. Ciena squeezed 16 optical channels at 1.6-nm intervals into the erbium-amplier
spectrum. Lucent Technologies and Pirelli also introduced WDM systems. The post-deadline session
heard of hero experiments that sent a
trillion bits per second through a single
optical ber, although chromatic dispersion and nonuniform amplier gain limited transmission span to 150 km in the best
result, from Fujitsu.
The 1997 OFC, held in Dallas, was
only slightly larger than the 1996 event.
But the 2227 February 1998 OFC in San
Jose was a big step up. The Optical Society
and IEEE had expected total attendance to
top 7000, but it jumped 30% to 8446,
with technical attendance up 25% to a
record 2672. Exhibit space was up 26%
Fig. 1. Total attendance over a period extending from 1979 to
to 61,000 square feet, and the number of
2012 showing the sharp peak in the bubble years.
283
exhibitors rose nearly 16% to 342. Figure 2 shows how the total square footage
of the exhibit space changed over a period
extending from 1979 to 2012.
Hero experiments reported at the 1998
post-deadline sessions reached a key
milestonethe dense-WDM demonstrations that sent a terabit per second hundreds
of kilometers through a series of ber ampliers. Bell Labs sent a hundred 10-Gb/s
channels 400 km, and NTT sent fty
20 Gb/s channels 600 km. The highest data
Fig. 2. Total square footage of the exhibit area over a period
extending from 1979 to 2012 showing the sharp peak in the
rate carried commercially at a single wavebubble years.
length was only 2.5 Gb/s at the time, but
Lucent said they would have hardware in
service by the end of the year transmitting 10 Gb/s on each of 40 wavelengths. Meanwhile, regional and
metropolitan networks were installing WDM systems to increase capacity without costly construction.
Meanwhile, the technology-heavy NASDAQ index was rising about as fast as OFC attendance
closing at 1766 in the middle of OFC, up 29% from a year earlier. Fibers potential bandwidth was
pulling the optics industry along with Internet stocks, and at the end of 1998 the NASDAQ index was
up 39% for the year.
The trend continued in 1999, when OFC moved to the larger San Diego Convention Center and
drew a record 10,206 people, up 21%, including 3331 technical registrants, a 25% increase. The
number of companies rose a comparatively modest 13%, but booth sizes grew faster as big companies
pumped up their presence, occupying 83,700 square feet of space, a hefty 37% increase. Stock values
were also up, with the NASDAQ at 2339 during the February show, up 32% from during the 1998
OFC.
Wall Street Discovers Optics

As ber technology improved and the demand for bandwidth soared, sales increased and Wall Street
began taking optics seriously.
Optics and telecommunication stocks soared during the late 1990s. The stock of JDS-Fitel,
formed in 1981, doubled after it went public in 1996, then doubled again in 1997 and in 1998. In
early 1999 JDS announced a $6.1 billion merger with another fast-growing optics company,
Uniphase.
In May, Enron announced it was forming a bandwidth market to trade capacity on installed ber
systems. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Fortune magazine had repeatedly ranked Enron as the
most innovative company in the country, and the demand for bandwidth seemed almost unlimited.
JDS Uniphase stock took off, soaring almost a factor of nine in 1999 as it continued a wave of
acquisition. In November it announced it would buy Optical Coating Laboratory Inc. for $2.8 billion in
stock. Stocks of other optics companies such as Corning and of system makers such as Nortel and
Lucent likewise multiplied in price. The whole NASDAQ index nearly doubled during 1999, climbing
from 2193 to 4069, but optics stocks rose even faster as investors clamored for optical stocks. Friends
and family asked optickers for stock tips. Figure 3 shows how the price of JDSU stock varied over a
period extending from 2 January 1996 to 2 January 2004.
January 2000 saw another blockbuster merger, with JDS Uniphase buying E-Tek Dynamics in a
deal that would close for $17 billion in June.
OFC recognized the importance of the booming market in selecting technology author and analyst
George Gilder as the opening plenary speaker. Gilder had become a ber enthusiast because he thought
the seemingly innite bandwidth of optics could transform the world. His stock recommendations had
lured investors into optical and telecommunication companies, and his presence on the program helped
284
draw throngs of stock analysts, venture

capitalists, and investors to join a record
crowd of engineers and scientists.
Lines wound around the Baltimore
Convention Center, overwhelming show
managers. Technical registration was
6636, almost double the previous year, and
total attendance was 16,934, up 65%.
Exhibits from 483 companies sprawled
over 121,300 square feet.
As if to celebrate Gilders talk, the
Fig. 3. Price of JDSU stock over a period extending from
NASDAQ index crossed the 5000 mark
2 January 1996 to 2 January 2004 showing the sharp peak in the
for the rst time on 7 March 2000, the day
bubble years.
of his opening talk. The NASDAQ continued upward during the conference,
peaking at 5132 on the nal day before closing at 5049. As attendees went home to recover
from the show, the chief analyst of Prudential Securities said the index could reach 6000 by the
end of 2000.
The market had reached dizzying heights. MCI Worldcoms market capitalization reached $168
billion in April 1999. Lucent Technologies reached $285 billion in December 1999. But those were their
peak valuations, and other technology stocks were slipping as well. The Monday after OFC the
NASDAQ dropped 141 points and did not see 5000 again until July 2015. May saw the rst big dotcom failures, and more followed in the summer. The NASDAQ closed the year at 2470, and did not see
3000 again until 2012.
Optical stocks were slower to slip. JDSUs market capitalization peaked at $181 billion during the
summer. On 10 July, JDSU announced a mind-boggling plan to buy SDL Inc. for stock then worth $41
billion. That made SDL CEO Donald Scifres a billionaire on paper in August, when Forbes ranked him
number 218 on its list of the 400 richest Americans. But JDSU stock started sliding downhill in
September, and when the deal closed on February 2001, the stock was worth only $13.5 billion.
Aside from stocks slipping to more realistic values, the ber industry seemed healthy going into
2001. Needing more space, OFC booked the sprawling Anaheim Convention Center for 1922 March
2001. Booth space sold like hotcakes. A record 970 companies occupied 270,000 square feet at the
trade show; both numbers had doubled from 2000. Total attendance more than doubled to 37,806,
with technical registration reaching 10,888, a 64% increase.
Industry executives, analysts, and investors packed the OSA Photonics and Telecommunications
Executive Forum on the ber market held across the street at the Disneyland Hotel. Optimism was in
the air, but so were hints of trouble. Opening speaker John Dexheimer cited concerns including the rst
failures in telecommunications, a massive debt hangover from some $250 billion in dubious loans to
lay new ber, and many companies trying to do the same thing.
The number of startups in the exhibit hall showed the massive investment in cutting-edge optical
technology. The technical sessions included such impressive feats as Alcatels transmission of 3 Tb/s
through 7380 km of ber, enough to span the Atlantic. But that capacity was far beyond what anyone
needed in April 2001, too many companies on the show oor offered nearly identical products, and
some booths displayed no identiable product but stock.
Within sight of Disneyland, the optics industry had slipped into a cartoon world. Like Wile E.
Coyote, the industry had run off clear off the cliff, but in cartoon physics the law of gravity lets you hang
in mid-air with your legs churning until you look down. Only then does gravity take hold and bring the
inevitable splat.
The bubble was collapsing and sales were slumping. In April JDSU laid off 5000 people, about a
fth of its employees. In a 9 May plenary talk at CLEO, JDSU CEO Josef Straus said he had learned
the laws of gravity apply up and down. The telecomm industry was learning that it is hard to make
money selling cheap bandwidth, especially when projected Internet trafc growth rates turned out to be
as exaggerated as Worldcoms prot statements.
285
Enrons bandwidth market never took off, and by the summer of 2001 the whole company was
looking wobbly. By years end, Enron became the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
By September, Nortel stock worth $1000 a year earlier was worth only $72. A grim joke noted that
investing the same amount in Budweiserthe beer, not the stockwould have left empty bottles worth
$76 in a state with a deposit law. JDS wrote off nearly $50 billion in goodwill and slashed its staff to
less than half its peak level. In January 2002, Global Crossing, which had built a global ber network,
led for bankruptcy with $12 billion in debt, the fth largest in U.S. history.
The magic was gone when OFC returned to Anaheim in March 2002, but the industrys legs were
still churning furiously in mid-air. OFC sold 320,000 square feet of booth space to 1204 exhibitors,
over 20% more companies than in 2011. But some exhibitors never showed, having run out of money.
With 32,944 attendees, the show was busy, but many were job-hunting.
At the OSA Executive Forum, market analyst John Ryan looked back at 1999 to 2001 as the
drunken sailor years when network operators spent tens of billions of dollars on equipment they did
not need. But he held out hope, declaring Unlike the concept of selling dog food on the Internet,
telecom isnt going away. The audience laughed, a bit uneasily. Four months later, MCI Worldcom
eclipsed Enrons record to become the largest bankruptcy in American history, toppled by some $11
billion in accounting fraud that earned CEO Bernie Ebbers a 25-year jail sentence.
That was the last giant OFC. Attendance dropped by more than half in 2003, as 15,023 people
spread thinly through the sprawling Atlanta Convention Center. Exhibitor count and booth space
shrank less precipitously, perhaps because the space was sold in advance, and as in 2002 some
companies never showed up.
Plots of OFC attendance and exhibits show the bubble years as aberrant spikes, not quite as dramatic
as peaks in company stock prices. The most recent OFC, shown in Figs. 1 and 2, in 2012 in Los Angeles,
drew 11,617 attendees, with 560 exhibitors occupying 91,000 square feetputting the 2012 OFC
midway between the 1999 and 2000 gatherings. Growth has resumed, at a more rational level.
Looking back, Gilder was right in calling ber a disruptive technology. But he failed to understand
that such a disruption could cause a destructive bubble in stock prices. The bubbles inevitable collapse
vaporized illusory gains many times the $65 billion fraud of Bernard Madoffs Ponzi scheme. The
market capitalization of JDSU alone shrank from a peak of $181 billion to a current few billion dollars,
a loss of 2.5 Madoffs.
The industry survived the bubble, although scars remain. Someday your brother-in-law may
forgive you for saying JDSU stock was a good investment in 2000.
Further Readings
1. L. Endlich, Optical Illusions: Lucent and the Crash of Telecom (Simon & Schuster, 2004).
2. J. Hecht, City of Light: The Story of Fiber Optics, Revised and Expanded Edition (Oxford University
Press, 2004).
3. O. Malik, Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist (Wiley, 2003).
4. B. McLean and P. Elkind, The Smartest Guys in The Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of
Enron (Portfolio-Penguin, 2004).
5. A. Odlyzko, Internet growth, myth and reality, use and abuse, http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/
doc/internet.growth.myth.pdf.
286
1991-PRESENT
The Evolution of Optical

Communications Networks
since 1990
Rod C. Alferness
Introduction
Optical communication networks have played a critical role in the information/communication
revolution and in turn have fundamentally changed the world and daily life for billions around
the globe. Without cost-effective, high-capacity optical networks that span continents and connect
them via undersea routes, the worldwide Internet would not be possible. Optical access systems,
both ber/cable and ber-to-the home, are also essential to bring broadband access to that global
Internet to homes and businesses. Increasingly important, ubiquitous broadband optical networks
provide the high-bandwidth backhaul essential for wireless access networks that enable
todays smartphone users. These networks also provide the always available broadband access
that will make cost-effective and energy-efcient cloud services available to all in the future.
All this has been made possible because, as capacity demand has grown exponentially
following the advent of the Internet, optical technology has made possible a dramatic reduction
in the cost per bit carried over an optical ber, allowing cost-effective capacity scaling. On
average, transmission capacity over a single ber has increased at a rate of 100-fold every ten
years over the last thirty years. As a result, as trafc has grown and is aggregated at the ingress
and disaggregated at egress nodes, new higher-capacity generations of long-haul and metro
optical systems have been deployed at a total cost that has grown sub-linearly relative to capacity.
Of course, the advantage of the optical frequencies for communication is the inherent ability to
serve as a carrier for very-high-bandwidth information. Fiber provides an extremely attractive
transmission medium that offers both ultra-low loss and low chromatic dispersion. The latter
results in minimal pulse spreading, resulting in low inter-pulse (bit) interference after transmission
over large distances. At its most basic implementation, an optical transmission system requires an
optical source whose generated dc optical signal can be modulated with information at the
information bandwidth of interest, a ber, and an optical detector and supporting electronics.
Figure 1 captures the progress of the hero research transmission experiments [1]. Shown is
the maximum information capacity carried on a single ber versus the year the research results
were achieved. For this review, it is convenient to describe the research progress in ber optic
transmission capacity in three waves or eras. In what follows, we use those generations, each
enabled by a set of critically important optical component technology innovations, to provide an
overview of the advances in optical communications since 1990.
At the start of the 1990s, commercially deployed systems provided per ber capacities of
about 1 Gb/s. They were used primarily in long-haul intercity applications to carry highly
aggregated voice service. At that time, increase in capacity demand was still driven mostly by
population growth as well as some increase in new services such as fax. The wavelength window
utilized was the minimum chromatic dispersion 1.3-m window. To increase time division
multiplexed bit rates (TDM) for xed distance between electrical regenerations, both signal
strength relative to noise and quality of the detected signal with respect to pulse-to-pulse
287
interference are important. To mitigate the reduced

receiver power at higher bit rates, research focused
on moving to the lowest-loss wavelength window
around 1.55 m. Unfortunately, for the standard
single-mode ber then available, chromatic dispersion at 1.55 m was signicant. For systems that
employed directly modulated lasers that exhibit
wavelength chirp during the change from the
on to off state, that dispersion caused problematic pulse spreading interference.
Three technology advances were instrumental
in strongly mitigating these limitations to enable
increased TDM rates. To avoid chromatic dispersion, it was essential that the semiconductor laser
Fig. 1. Reported research transmission systems
experiments showing maximum transmission capacity
operating at 1.5 m be truly single frequency. That
over a single ber vs. the year of the research results.
capability was provided by the distributed feedback
(DFB) laser, which could also be directly modulated
to provide information encoding. In addition, as TDM rates increased, external optical waveguide
modulators that provided high-speed optical information encoding without the chirping effects
proved to be essential for data rates above several gigabits per second.
Finally, high-gain, high-bandwidth avalanche photodiodes (APDs) to provide reasonable
optical to electrical conversion efciency were also needed for high-speed TDM systems. The
combination of single-frequency lasers operating at 1.5 m, signal encoding with external interferometer waveguide modulators, and detection with APDs resulted in record transmission experiments (216 Gb/s over 100-km spans) in the early 1990s that led to commercially deployed 10 Gb/s
systems in the late 1990s.
Wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) transmission systems employ multiple wavelengths, each
separately encoded with information that is passively multiplexed together onto a single single-mode
ber, transmitted over some distance, and then wavelength demultiplexed into separate channels whose
information is detected and received. While such systems had been proposed earlier, they had not
initially gained popularity because of the need for a regenerator for each wavelength at repeater sites.
Compared with increasing capacity via TDM, the approach did not scale capacity as cost effectively
as TDM.
The ber amplier totally changed the value proposition of WDM systems. While not a pulse
regenerator, the optical amplier provides relatively low-noise 2030-dB amplicationsufcient to
compensate for transmission loss over 50100 km of low loss ber. Most importantly, the optical
amplier can simultaneously amplify multiple wavelengths, each carrying a high-capacity TDM signal.
Notably, there is no mixing of signals, and amplication can be achieved for signals with arbitrarily
high information rates. Both erbium-doped and Raman-based ber ampliers have been developed,
with the former being the commercial workhorse. The erbium-doped ber amplier gain peaks at about
1.55 mwell aligned to the ber loss minimum.
Besides the ber amplier, the other key enabling technologies for WDM transmission systems are
the wavelength multiplexing and demultiplexing devices and single-mode lasers whose wavelength can
be precisely matched to the mux/demux wavelength response. For large wavelength counts, waveguide
grating routers based on silica waveguide technology are typically employed. Figure 2 shows the 80wavelength output from an early silica-based arrayed waveguide router. High-power (100-mW
output power) semiconductor pump lasers are required. Fiber amplied transmission systems are
essentially analog systems where amplier noise from each repeater accumulates, as does dispersive and
nonlinear pulse spreading. Careful dispersion management is very important. Zero-chirp optical
modulators are especially important for signal encoding to leverage the cost effectiveness of the
amplier over longer distances without electrical regenerators.
The rst WDM commercial systems, deployed in terrestrial long-haul applications in the mid1990s, employed eight wavelengths at 2.5 Gb/s, a tenfold improvement over the single-channel systems
288
Evolution of Optical Communications Networks since 1990
Fig. 2.
Measured
wavelength response of a silica
waveguide based grating router
80-wavelength channel
multiplexer/demultiplexer with
50 GHz channel spacing.
previously available. As multiplexing devices and amplier performance was improved, the number of
wavelengths was soon doubled and then quadrupled. In the research lab, work focused on WDM for
higher TDM rates, 10 Gb/s and beyond.
The rst WDM systems were deployed over existing standard single-mode ber. However, to
reduce the phase-matched nonlinear mixing effect of ber at its zero-dispersion wavelength, so called
non-zero-dispersion shifted bers were developed. Such bers could be used as the transmission ber
or in the repeater site as a dispersion compensating ber to undo dispersion accumulation. In this
case the transmission ber has sufcient dispersion over the transmission distance to avoid four-wave
mixing but produces pulse spreading that is undone by the compensating ber.
Undersea lightwave systems were an important driver and early adopter of ber amplied WDM
transmission systems that were especially attractive because they avoid undersea high-speed electronics,
which reduced the lead time for reliability testing. In addition, properly designed WDM transmission
systems offered the potential for future capacity growth by increasing the wavelength bit rate or the
number of wavelengths. The rst such system, a transatlantic system, included 16 wavelengths at
2.5 Gb/s each with repeater spacing of 100 km.
In research labs around the world, as multiplexing devices and amplier performance were
improved and techniques to mitigate dispersive and nonlinear transmission impairments developed,
single-ber transmission capacity results were improved, sometimes quite dramatically, every year.
These extraordinary hero transmission systems experiments became the highlight of the postdeadline session of The Optical Society (OSA, and IEEE Photonics and Communications) sponsored
Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) each year. Increased capacity in transmission systems experimental
results over the years (Fig. 1) were achieved by increasing the per wavelength bit rate from 2.5 Gb/s to
10 Gb/s to 40 Gb/s to 100 Gb/s. Key issues that needed to be addressed included demonstrating highspeed electronics, modulators, and receivers at the higher rates; mitigating nonlinear ber; and
managing dispersive effects. Total capacity was also increased by increasing the number of wavelengths. This was achieved either by increasing the bandwidth of the amplier or by nding ways to
reduce the wavelength spacing without reducing the information rate/wavelength, resulting in
improved spectral efciency.
The adoption of WDM transmission led to wavelength-based recongurable optical networks that
provide wavelength-level, cost-effective network bandwidth management. That evolution is shown
schematically in Fig. 3. Initially WDM was employed over linear links where all wavelengths were
aggregated onto the ber at one node and carried with periodic amplication to an end node. However,
in real networks, especially as the distance achievable without electronic regeneration has been
increased, the sources and destinations of trafc require off and on ramps for trafc entering between
289
Fig. 3. Evolution of
recongurable, wavelength
routed optical networks
employing recongurable
optical add/drops (ROADMs)
and optical cross-connects.
large metropolitan areas. Optical wavelength add/drop multiplexers provide those high-capacity on/off
ramps with a full wavelength of capacity and allow all other wavelengths to pass through the node
beneting from the amplication. While initially these were xed in number and which wavelengths
were added/dropped, these modules are now fully remotely recongurable with respect to both the
number of channels and which wavelengths are added/dropped.
Networks are not linear but are meshed to enhance resilience to equipment failures and ber cuts.
They require branching points where several ber routes coming into a major metropolitan area
connect to several exiting routes and also drop/add wavelengths at the node. In this case optical switch
modules, referred to as optical cross-connects, which, in a wavelength-selective manner connect
wavelength channels from one input ber route to a particular output route, are employed.
Automated, recongurable optical switch cross-connects have become essential elements in todays
WDM optical networks to effectively manage bandwidth capacity as demands increase and change.
The enabling technologies for recongurable wavelength add/drop multiplexers and cross-connects are
electrically controlled optical switches, either broadband or wavelength selective, together with
components known as wavelength multiplexers/demultiplexers. A variety of technologies have been
used for optical switch fabrics, including micro-mechanical (MEM), liquid crystal, and thermo-optical
waveguide switches. Integrated modules that include wavelength demultiplex/demultiplex (demux/
mux) together with optical space switches are also commercially available. Commercial wavelength
recongurable optical networks have been widely deployed at both national and metropolitan levels.
Integration, both monolithic and hybrid, has been important to cost effectively achieve the functional
complexity required for modern optical networks.
An important advantage of optical networks is the potential to upgrade the bit rate per wavelength
without the need to deploy new optical networking elements. The inherent bit rate independence of
optical ampliers (other than the possible need for higher pump power), optical switch fabrics, and mux/
demux elements has allowed carriers to upgrade properly designed recongurable optical networks,
initially operating at 10 Gb/s, to 40 Gb/s and 100 Gb/s by changing out only the ingress transmitters and
egress receiversa signicant advantage of optical networks. Express wavelengths can now be carried
cross continent without going through costly electronic regenerators, while along the way trafc can be
optically dropped and added to fully utilize the high-bandwidth-ber pipe.
At the time of this writing, commercial recongurable optical networks available and deployed for
national and metro applications have capacities of 10 Tb/s (100 wavelengths at 100 Gb/s) with fully
recongurable wavelength add/drop capability. Transoceanic commercial systems are operating at
capacities of 4 Tb/s.
290
The ubiquitous deployment of broadband wireless systems together with massive sharing of
consumer produced video and growing demand to access cloud based computational services
continues to drive bandwidth demand at 25%40% per year. There is every indication that demand
will continue to grow at 10 over the next ten years. Given the state of current commercial systems,
this suggests the need for 1 Pb/s systems in the next 810 years. Commercially, the next targeted bit rate
is likely to be 400 Gb/s followed by 1 Tb/s. To achieve higher speeds requires continued advancement in
high-speed electronics, photo detectors, modulators, and integration. It also requires the ability to
launch higher optical power while mitigating nonlinear effects. The number of wavelength channels is
limited by the required bandwidth per channel and the total transmission bandwidth limited by the
amplier. Optimizing system spectral efciency is essential. Achieving long-distance transmission
without regeneration is also important for cost-effective networks.
To achieve higher effective per wavelength channel capacity while limiting speed requirement,
research has focused on advanced coding techniques that use both amplitude and phase information as
offered by coherent detection. By employing coherent techniques it is also possible to apply polarization
multiplexing to effectively double channel capacity. Coherent techniques also allow the use of
electronics to mitigate deleterious transmission impairments. These modulation formats, including
quadrature phase-shifted keying (QPSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), require the use
of high-speed digital signal processors to convert the input signal information into the coded amplitude
and phase-modulation signals to drive complex nested optical amplitude and phase modulators to
encode the optical signal. As an example, with polarization multiplexing and 64-QAM (64 symbols per
bit), one can transmit at an effective rate of 320 Gb/s with electronics, modulator, and receiver
operating at only 80 Gbaud/s. The benets come with transmission trade-offs as well as the complexity
of high-speed digital signal processors. There has been substantial research progress in this area over the
last ve years as reected in the systems results of Fig. 1.
Within the past several years, concern has been growing that keeping up with bandwidth demand
will require another major technological leapan additional dimension of multiplexing. The proposed
dimension is to use space division as implemented either via multiple cores in a ber or multi-modes of a
single-core ber. For the system to be cost effective compared to simply building parallel ber optic
systems, it likely will be necessary to also demonstrate optical ampliers, at least, to act upon multiple
spatial modes simultaneously. Integration is likely to be essential.
Because of limited space we have focused here on long-haul and metro optical communication
networks. However, leveraging the technologies outlined here, there has been tremendous progress in
optical access systems as well. Fiber optic technology has been used to feed coaxial cable systems,
allowing increased reach and per user capacity. There is also increasing deployment of ber-to-thehome systems, especially using TDM-based passive optical network (PON) technology. Recently,
combined WDM and TDM PON technologies have been deployed to provide per home/business
capacities of 1 Gb/s.
In addition, optical technology to provide intrabuilding interconnection in data centers is a
growing application that will become even more critical as cloud services evolve. Distances are
relatively short, and low cost is especially important. Optical and opto-electronic integration, either
hybrid or monolithic, will be essential. The role of optical switching in data centers is being
explored.
Throughout this history of incredible progress, OSA has played a critically important role in
fostering and nurturing the continuous discovery, invention, and demonstration of optical components
and systems that have been key to the dramatic progress of this eld. OFC, a premier global conference
on optical communications, was rst held (as the Topical Meeting on Optical Fiber Transmission) in
1975 in Williamsburg, Virginia. OFC/NFOEC 2013 had more than 12,000 attendees from all over the
world. The OFC post-deadline sessions are standing-room only events where researchers around the
globe present their latest breakthrough results.
OSA has also nurtured newly emerging technologies in their formative stages, including
ber ampliers, recongurable optical networks, and ber to the home through highly focused
topical meetings that offer ample opportunity for discussion and debate. The Journal of Lightwave
Technology, co-sponsored by OSA and IEEE, has been a key journal for sharing and archiving
291
advances in the eld. Many of the members of the optical communication eld have played leadership
roles in OSA as well.
Acknowledgements
In this short historic overview, scope and space have not allowed proper citations [2]. My thanks to the
large global communitymany of whom are members of OSAwho have contributed to the
extraordinary progress in optical networks described here.
References
1. Adapted from R. W. Tkach, Scaling optical communications for the next decade and beyond, Bell
Labs Tech. J. 14, 39 (2010).
2. Suggested further reading for recent overview and update: Special issue on the Evolution of Optical
Networks, Proc. IEEE 100(5) (2012).
292
1991PRESENT
Radhakrishnan Nagarajan
n essay on the history of integrated photonics invariably starts with the seminal paper by
Miller [1]. In 1969 the idea was way ahead of its time, and many of the components
needed to make such an integrated circuit a reality had yet to be invented. Hayashi and
Panishs demonstration of the continuous wave (CW) room temperature operation of a
semiconductor laser, a critical device for the photonic integrated circuit (PIC), was still a year
away [2]. Optical transport, where PICs nd their applications, got its somewhat fortuitous start
in 1970 as well with the report of a low-loss optical ber by the group at Corning [3].
There is always some personal bias in presenting the historical evolution of any technology.
Figure 1 graphically shows one such historical progression of PIC complexity, as measured in the
number of integrated components on a single InP substrate, with time. The details of the devices
and references presented in Fig. 1 are in [4]. InP and its alloys are the material of choice in
fabricating light emitters for optical transport applications. This is due to the low-loss window at
1550 nm and the low-dispersion point at 1300 nm in the standard silica optical ber.
For the rst decade or so after the demonstration of the CW laser in the GaAs system, InP
lasers started to mature. In the mid-1980s there was active work in the area of opto-electronic
integrated circuits (OEICs), where the integration of electronic devices such as HBT (heterojunction bipolar transistor) and FET (eld effect transistor) with laser diodes and photodetectors
was pursued. In the late 1980s three-section tunable DBR (distributed Bragg reector) lasers were
introduced. This was also when electro-absorption modulators (EAMs) integrated with distributed feedback (DFB) lasers were demonstrated. The trend continued with more complicated (four
and ve section) tunable laser sources that were also integrated with an EAM or a semiconductor
optical amplier (SOA). The next step was the demonstration of the arrayed waveguide grating
(AWG) or PHASAR (phased array) router integrated with photodetectors for multi-channel
receivers or with gain regions and EAM for multi-frequency lasers and multi-channel modulated
sources. One of the most complex PICs reported in the last century was a four-channel optical
cross-connect integrating 2 AWGs with 16 MZI (MachZehnder interferometer) switches. At
this stage the most sophisticated laboratory devices still had component counts below 20 while
those in the eld had component counts of about 4.
The trend in low-level photonic integration continued into the 2000s with one of the larger
chips reported being a 32-channel WDM channel selector. In 2003, ThreeFive Photonics
reported a 40-channel WDM monitor chip, integrating 9 AWGs with 40 detectors. MetroPhotonics reported a 44-channel power monitor based with an echelle grating demultiplexer. The
commercial development of both chips was subsequently discontinued. The rst successful
attempt at a commercial large-scale photonic integrated chip (LS-PIC) was made in 2004 when
Innera introduced a 10-channel transmitter, with each channel operating at 10 Gbit/s. This
device with an integration count in excess of 50 individual components was the rst LS-PIC
device deployed in the eld to carry live network trafc. This was quickly followed in 2006 by a
40-channel monolithic InP transmitter, each channel operating at 40 Gbit/s, with a total
component count larger than 240, and aggregate data rate of 1.6 Tbit/s. The complementary
40-channel receiver PIC also had an integrated, polarization independent, multi-channel SOA at
the input.
2004, the year when the rst commercial large-scale photonic integrated circuit was
deployed, proved to be a watershed year for silicon photonics as well when Intel demonstrated
293
Fig. 1.
Historical trend and timeline for monolithic, photonic integration on InP (without including vertical
cavity InP devices). The vertical scale is linear, and the red lled circles start at 1 and go to 240. The
trend shows an exponential growth in PIC complexity in recent years. Unlike silicon ICs where the transistor
count is a universal metric, there is no unique benchmark for complexity in photonic integration. For this
exercise, we have counted a functional unit (which may be a combination of other optical elements) as a
device. For example, an MZI is counted as 1 and not as 3. Likewise an AWG is counted as 1 irrespective of
the fraction of the PIC real estate it occupies.
the rst gigabit per second optical silicon (Si)-on-insulator (SOI) modulator [5]. Si as a platform for
optical integration dates back to the 1980s [6,7]. In [6] can be found an excellent review of the early
years of Si photonics. Unlike InP, Si has a centro-symmetric crystalline structure and does not exhibit
the linear electro-optic effect that is commonly used for modulating light in InP. Most Si modulators
are based on the carrier plasma effect, change of refractive index with carrier accumulation, or
depletion. Although this is a weak material effect, the capacitor structure, which allows for a large
effective charge transfer, improves the efciency considerably [6]. Although there are reports of
integrated Ge lasers on Si substrates [8], for the most part the light sources for Si photonics are made
of InP and are integrated using hybrid techniques [9].
In Fig. 1 we saw the progression of PIC complexity thru the 2005 timeframe. Although some of
the PICs, such as the switches and CW sources, were modulation format agnostic, for the most part
these operated using OOK (onoff keying). Figure 2 shows the progression of PICs used for
advanced modulation formats such as QPSK (quadrature phase shift keying) used in optical
coherent communication. The details of the devices and references presented in Fig. 2 can be
found in [10].
Coherent optical communication development started in the mid-1980s. After a gap of more than
ten years, in the mid-2000s the eld went through a revival with the availability of high-speed Si ASICs
and advanced digital signal processing algorithms that eliminated the need for ultra-stable optical
sources and analog phase/frequency/polarization tracking of the optical carrier at the receiver. Early
coherent receiver PICs were all single channel. They were designed for binary phase shift keying
(BPSK) modulation format. BPSK is similar to QPSK except that there are no data in the quadrature
294
Fig. 2.
A timeline for the development of coherent PICs. There is a gap between the early 1990s, when
EDFAs were rst introduced, and late 2000s when coherent communication systems saw deployment.
Key: Mode = BPSK, QPSK; Pol = number of polarizations detected; LO = whether a LO was integrated into
the PIC; CH = number of channels integrated onto a PIC. Most of these PICs are receivers, with exception in
2008 when a 10 channel transmitter PIC was reported which included an I /Q modulator integrated with an
optical source, for each channel, on the same substrate.
component of the signal. A simple, single-stage MZ modulator (MZM) may be used to generate a
BPSK signal. BPSK signals have lower spectral efciency but better noise margin for longer
transmission distances. There were early attempts to integrate a LO (local oscillator) on the receiver
PIC as well. A multi-channel PIC with I/Q MZM integrated with an optical source was reported in
2008. There have been a number of variants on the DQPSK and QPSK (with external LO) receiver
PICs reported since then. The DQPSK PICs also have the polarization components integrated onto the
same substrate. The rst multichannel, dual polarization, QPSK receiver PIC with an integrated LO
per wavelength was reported in 2011. Unlike the rst phase of the history of integrated photonics
discussed in Fig. 1, the evolution of coherent PICs shown in Fig. 2 has devices on both the InP and Si
platforms.
References
1. S. Miller, Integrated optics: an introduction, Bell Syst. Tech J. 48, 20592069 (1969).
2. I. Hayashi, M. Panish, P. Foy, and S. Sumski, Junction lasers which operate continuously at room
3. I. Kapron, D. Keck, and R. Maurer, Radiation losses in glass optical waveguides, Appl. Phys. Lett. 17,
423425 (1970).
4. R. Nagarajan, M. Kato, J. Pleumeekers, P. Evans, S. Corzine, S. Hurtt, A. Dentai, S. Murthy, M. Missey,
R. Muthiah, R. Salvatore, C. Joyner, R. Schneider, M. Ziari, F. Kish, and D. Welch, InP photonic
integrated circuits, J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 16, 11131125 (2010).
5. D. Samara-Rubio, L. Liao, A. Liu, R. Jones, M. Paniccia, O. Cohen, and D. Rubin, A gigahertz siliconon-insulator Mach-Zehnder modulator, in Optical Fiber Communication Conference (Optical Society
of America, 2004), post-deadline paper 15.
6. G. Reed, W. Headley, and C. Png, Silicon photonics: the early years, Proc. SPIE 5730, 596921 (2005).
295
7. R. Soref, The past, present, and future of silicon photonics, IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 12,
16781687 (2006).
8. R. Camacho-Aguilera, Y. Cai, N. Patel, J. Bessette, M. Romagnoli, L. Kimerling, and J. Michel, An
electrically pumped germanium laser, Opt. Express 20, 1131611320 (2012).
9. M. Heck and J. Bowers, Hybrid and heterogeneous photonic integration, in Handbook of Silicon
Photonics, L. Vivien and L. Pavesi, eds. (CRC Press, 2013), Chap. 11.
10. R. Nagarajan, C. Doerr, and F. Kish, Semiconductor photonic integrated circuit transmitters and
receivers, in Optical Fiber Telecommunications, Vol. VI A: Components and Subsystems, I. Kaminow,
T. Li, and A. Willner, eds. (Elsevier, 2013), Chap. 2.
296
1991-PRESENT
New Wave Microstructured

Optical Fibers
Philip Russell
Background
In the early 1990s there was a good deal of excitement about three-dimensional periodic
structures in which light cannot exist at frequencies within a photonic bandgap (PBG) [1]. Henry
van Driel (Optical Society Fellow, University of Toronto) even compared the atmosphere at a
packed-out Quantum Electronics and Laser Science (QELS) session on PBGs (on the afternoon of
the last day of the conference) to 1969 Woodstock! At that time it occurred to the author that, if
one could create a two-dimensional PBG crystal of microscopic hollow channels in the cladding of
an optical ber, low-loss guidance of light in a hollow core might be possible [2,3]. The challenge
would be to design a suitable structure and not least work out a way of making it (in pioneering
work at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s, primitive structures with a small number of large
hollow channels had been made, the aim being air-clad glass ber cores [4]). (See Fig. 1.)
Actually, the rst hints that total internal reectionthe workhorse of conventional ber
opticsmight not be the only way to guide light had emerged in 1968 with the little known
theoretical work of Melekhin and Manenkov in the Soviet Union [5], followed by a more detailed
studyagain purely theoreticalby Yariv and Yeh at Caltech in 1976 [6]. Their idea was to
create a cylindrical Bragg stack from concentric tubular layers of alternating high and low
refractive index. Rays of light traveling within a certain range of conical angles would be Bragg
reected back into the core for all azimuthal directions. The trick then was to choose a core
diameter that supports a Mie-like resonance at conical angles where the cylindrical Bragg stack
has a radial stop-band, resulting in a low-loss guided mode (note that such Bragg bers do not
possess a PBG since light is free to propagate azimuthally).
The operating principle of both of these proposals is closely linked to anti-resonant reecting
optical waveguiding (ARROW), in which light is partially conned by a structure of one or more
pairs of anti-resonant layers. Originally proposed by Duguay (AT&T Bell Laboratories) in 1986,
these are essentially FabryPerot cavities operating off resonance so that they reect light
strongly back into the core [7,8]. When the number of such layers becomes large the ARROW
structure begins to resemble a Bragg waveguide; i.e., the anti-resonance condition coincides with
the presence of a radial stop-band [9].
Although solid-core versions of Bragg bers have been produced using modied chemical
vapor deposition (MCVD) (at IRCOM in Limoges, France) [10], for guidance in a hollow core
one is up against the need for the radial stop-band to appear at values of axial refractive index
less than 1. This means that individual layers must be very thin (~0.69 , where is the vacuum
wavelength), enhancing the effects of dopant diffusion during ber drawing and further reducing
the already weak index contrast. Small index contrast also has the drawback that, for good
connement, a large number of periods is needed and the structure must be highly perfect to
avoid leakage through defect states in the cladding layers.
The ideal structure would consist of a series of concentric glass layers with air between
them, but of course this would not hold together mechanically. A possible compromise is to
fabricate a structure of rings held together with thin glass membranes, but the losses so far
reported are quite high [11]. One could think of increasing the index contrast using two solid
297
materials, but here the problems are

extreme for another reason. Pairs of
drawable glasses with compatible melting and mechanical properties, a large
refractive index difference and high optical transparency are hard to found.
More exotic combinations of chalcogenide and polymer overcome the mechanical problems, offering moderately low
losses even though the absorption is extremely high in the polymer layers. Nevertheless, the company Omniguide has
achieved 1 dB/m at 10 m in such Bragg
bers [12], which are now used in laser
surgery [13].
Making the First

Photonic Crystal Fiber
(PCF)
When the author proposed what he rst
called holey ber, defusing any anxious
looks by adding that the word needed an
e, he was met with a good deal of
skepticism. Would this new thing, the
photonic bandgap, really workwasnt
Fig. 1. Three-core ber made by Kaiser and colleagues at
the refractive index of silica glass too
Bell Labs in the early 1970s. (Reprinted with permission of
small? The literature suggested that twoAlcatel-Lucent USA Inc.)
dimensional PBGs appear only if the
refractive index ratio is very large, say 2.2:1 for a two-dimensional dielectricair structure [1] (actually
this turns out to be true only for purely in-plane propagation [14]). Even if it did work, would the bend
losses not be huge? And then there were the practicalities of making it. The author remembers Clive
Day, who had been at the Post Ofce Research Laboratories in Martlesham (UK) in the 1970s, recalling
how difcult the single-material bers had been to make (in 1997 British Telecom donated Days
three-legged drawing tower to the authors then group at the University of Bath, allowing them to make
many of the rst discoveries about photonic crystal bers (PCFs)). (See Fig. 2.)
Although conventional lithography worked well for very thin photonic crystal structures, it was
hard to see how it could be adapted to produce even millimeter lengths of PCF. More promising was
work at Naval Research Laboratories in Washington, where Tonucci had shown that multi-channel
glass plates with hole diameters as small as 33 nm, in a tightly packed array, could be produced using
draw-down and selective etching techniques [15]. The maximum channel length was limited by the
etching chemistry to ~1 mm, and though the structures were impressively perfect, they were not bers.
The earliest attempt, in 1991, involved drilling a pattern of holes into a stub of silica glass, the hope
being that it could be drawn into ber. Machining an array of 1 mm holes in a stub of silica ~2.5 cm in
diameter (the largest the drawing furnace would accommodate) proved beyond the capabilities of the
ultrasonic drill, so this approach was abandoned. Since then it has been shown that drilling works well
for softer materials such as compound glasses or polymers. Another versatile technique is extrusion, in
which a molten glassy material is forced through a die containing a suitably designed pattern of holes.
Although not yet successfully used for fused silica (existing die materials contaminate the glass at the
high temperatures needed [16]), extrusion works well for both polymers [17,18] and soft glasses [19].
(See Fig. 3.)
298
After various different approaches

had been tried, the rst successful
silicaair PCF structure emerged from the
drawing tower in late 1995, the result of
the efforts of Tim Birks and Jonathan
Knightpostdocs in the authors group
at the Optoelectronics Research Center
(ORC) in Southampton. The preform was
constructed by stacking 217 silica capillaries (eight layers outside the central capillary) into a tight-packed hexagonal array.
The diameter-to-pitch ratio of the holes in
the nal ber was too small for PBG
guidance in a hollow core, so we decided
to make a PCF with a solid central core
surrounded by 216 air channels [16]. The
result was a working PCF, which guided
by a kind of modied total internal reection. The results were reported in 1996 in a
post-deadline paper at OSAs Conference
on Optical Fiber Communications and
subsequently published in Optics Letters
[20,21]. (See Fig. 4.)
Breakthroughs and
Applications
This work led to the discovery of endlessly
single-mode (ESM) PCF, which, if it guides
at all, supports only the fundamental guided
mode [14]. There is a story behind the
publication of this result. Submitted to
Optics Letters, the manuscript received
lukewarm or negative reviews and was
initially rejected. Feeling that justice was on
their side, the group appealed to the editor,
Anthony Campillo, who took a look at it
and decided to accept it. Currently (October
2015), with more than 1700 citations, it is
one of the most frequently cited in the eld.
ESM behavior is also a feature of ridge
waveguides formed by etching a thin lm
of dielectric material so as to produce a
raised strip, and in fact Kaiser points this
out in his 1974 paper [4]. The reason is
simple: thinner structures support modes
with lower refractive indices, which means
that the fundamental mode of the thicker
ridge will be trapped by the equivalent total
internal reection. Compared to planar
ridge waveguides, however, ESM-PCF is
Fig. 2. Clive Day working with his three-legged drawing tower

at the Post Ofce Research Laboratories in Martlesham (UK) in
the 1970s. (Courtesy Dr. Clive Day and the Post Ofce Research
Centre, Martlesham Health, UK.)
Fig. 3. Maryanne Large, Martijn van Eijkelenborg and Alex

Argyros drawing polymer PCF at the University of Sydney.
(Photograph by Justin Digweed.)
299
free of birefringence, provided its structure

has perfect sixfold symmetry [22].
Armed with a technique suitable for
routine manufacture of microstructured
bers, they set off to explore what could be
donethe fun had begun. A string of results
followed, the rst being an ESM-PCF with
an ultra-large mode area [23]. This arose
from the realization that ESM behavior
allowed one to operate in regimes where a
conventional ber would be multimode. At
the other extreme, it was pointed out in 1999
that cores of diameter ~1 m, surrounded by
large hollow channels, would have very high
anomalous dispersion at 1550 nm, which it
was later realized would push the zero dispersion to wavelengths much shorter than
the canonical 1.29 m associated with conventional silica single-mode ber [24]. This
was to lead to perhaps the biggest breakthrough so far in applications of PCF: the
demonstration by a team at Bell Laboratories that an octave-spanning frequency comb
could be produced using ~100 fs pulses of
few nanoJoule energies from a mode-locked
Ti:sapphire oscillator [25,26]. This created
huge excitement when it was presented as a
post-deadline paper at OSAs Conference on
Fig. 4. Right to left: Tim Birks, Jonathan Knight, and the
Lasers and Electro-Optics in 1999, and conauthor at the University of Bath in 2011. (Courtesy University
tributed materially to the award of the 2005
of Bath.)
Nobel Prize for Physics to Jan Hall of NIST
in Boulder, Colorado, and Ted Hnsch of
the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum
Optics in Munich [27,28]. (See Fig. 5.)
The year 1999 also saw the rst report
of a hollow-core PCF, indicating that one
could indeed guide light using the new
physics of PBGs [29]. Fred Leonberger,
the program chair of CLEO 2002 in Long
Beach, California, was kind enough to
invite the author to give one of the plenary
talksa sure sign that PCF had, within
only a few years, attracted considerable
attention. The next technological steps focused mostly on improving the perfor Fig. 5. Iconic photograph of white-light supercontinuum
mance, mainly the loss, of these new bers.
taken in 2002 by Ph.D. student Will Reeves. (Courtesy University
Following intensive development at Cornof Bath.)
ing and BlazePhotonics (a post-deadline
paper at OFC in 2004 reported 1.7 dB/km
[30]), the lowest published loss of hollow core PCF stands at 1.2 dB/km at 1550 nm [31]. Just before
BlazePhotonics closed down, the R&D team actually had reduced the value still further to 0.8 dB/km.
It was rapidly realized that thermal post-processing, together with pressure control, twisting, and
stretching, could be used to make radical changes in the local ber characteristics post-fabrication.
300
Fig. 6.
Scanning electron
micrographs of a selection of
different photonic crystal and
microstructured bers.
(Courtesy Max-Planck Institute
for the Science of Light.)
These techniques have thrown up a large number of useful devices, including long-period gratings,
rocking lters, helical bers, and the remarkable photonic lanterns now used to lter out atmospheric
emission lines in ber-based astronomy [32,33]. Based on all-solid multi-core bers, these devices
perform the astonishing feat of adiabatically channeling each mode of a multi-mode ber into separate
single-mode bers.
Applications of the new ber structures continue to emerge, an obvious highlight being broadband
light sources millions of time brighter than incandescent lamps and extending into the UV, pumped by
Q-switched Nd:YAG microchip lasers or Yb-doped ber lasers at 1-m wavelength. These are now to
be found in many laboratory instruments, including commercial microscopes. New types of sensing,
ber have emerged, some of them reminiscent of the original single-material bers of Kaiser (e.g., the socalled Mercedes ber [34]). Hollow core PCF has perhaps opened up the greatest number of new
opportunities. For example, it is being employed as a microuidic system for monitoring chemical
reactions, in which guided light is used both to photo-excite and to measure changes in the absorption
spectrum [35]. (See Fig. 6.) Compared to conventional microuidic circuits, the quantity of liquid
required is very small, the long path-length means that very small absorption changes can be detected,
and the high intensity achievable in the narrow core for moderate optical power means that reactions
can be rapidly initiated. PCF is also being used in many other optical sensors, with applications in
environmental detection, biomedical sensing, and structural monitoring.
The unique ability of hollow-core PCF to keep light tightly focused in a single mode in a gas is
creating a revolution in nonlinear optics. For the rst time it is possible to explore ultrafast nonlinear
optics in gases in a system where the dispersion can be tuned by changing the gas pressure and
composition [36]. Raman frequency combs spanning huge ranges of frequency, from the UV to the midIR, can be generated at quite modest power levels [37,38]. Atomic vapors of, e.g., Rb and Cs can be
incorporated into the hollow core, permitting experiments on EIT and few-photon switching [39].
Hollow core also adds a new dimension to the important eld of optical tweezers: the absence of
diffraction means that radiation forces can be employed to transversely trap and continuously propel
dielectric particles over curved paths many meters in length [40].
In Conclusion
The Optical Society, through its conferences and publications (especially Optics Letters and Optics
Express), has played and continues to play a major role in promoting a disruptive technology that,
through delivering orders of magnitude improvement over prior art, seems likely over the next decades
to have an increasing impact in both commercial and scientic research.
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(2009).
40. O. A. Schmidt, M. K. Garbos, T. G. Euser, and P. St.J. Russell, Recongurable optothermal
microparticle trap in air-lled hollow-core photonic crystal ber, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 024502 (2012).
303
1991-PRESENT
Ultrafast-Laser Technology from the

1990s to Present
Wayne H. Knox
he eld of femtosecond lasers was in a difcult state in January 1984. Lasers that
generated pulses of 100 fs or less in duration were few and far between, but there were a
growing number of research applications they could be applied to. For example, at Bell
Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, David A. B. Miller and Daniel S. Chemla were very
interested in studying the excitonic nonlinear optical response and electro-optic properties of
GaAs-based quantum wells, which were rather new back then. The author was a post-doc with
that group and was able to take advantage of the magnicent femtosecond laser labs that had
been developed by Richard L. Fork and Charles V. Shank to work on the generation of infrared
femtosecond pulses, which were perfect to use to study the dynamics of GaAs-based quantum
wells. A few years before, Chuck Shanks group had developed the rst colliding pulse modelocked laser that reliably gave pulses of great stability and always shorter than 100 fs around
625 nm wavelength [1]. They had built a multi-stage dye-cell amplier system pumped by a
frequency-doubled Q-switched Nd:YAG laser at 10 Hz rate, producing millijoule pulse energies
that were more than intense enough to generate a beautiful white-light continuum. Pumped by an
argon laser with a few watts of green light, the dye laser produced average powers of a few tens of
milliwatts in a train of femtosecond pulses as long as the dye jets were behaving well. Bad
behavior included clogging, popping hoses squirting dye all over the lab. And, of course, the dye
would eventually turn bad and have to be changed. So, given that the laser was generating only
one color of light in the visible at low power and was running on 40 kW of electrical line power,
while using ve gallons per minute of chilled water, it was very difcult to imagine how such a
laser technology could be useful in the world someday.
The development of Ti:sapphire lasers by Peter Moulton while at MIT Lincoln Labs and
subsequent demonstration of Kerr-lens mode locking by Wilson Sibbetts group [2, 3] were a
tremendous advance for the eld, offering much higher powers and near-infrared tunability as
well. Chirped-pulse amplication, by Gerard Mourous group at the University of Rochester in
1985 [4], led to widely scalable oscillator-amplier systems of great variety and complexity.
Simultaneously, development of erbium and then later ytterbium ber gain media together
with the development of cheap high-power laser diode pump sources were driven strongly by
demand during the telecommunications bubble that peaked in March 2000 with the NASDAQ
briey hitting 5000. Combining these advances in solid-state as well as ber technologies now
has made possible a new generation of practical ultrafast compact laser sources that are
offered by more than 30 commercial suppliers, many of which are still in search of their
killer application. Figure 1 shows the state of the ultrafast-laser eld in 1995, plotting
shortest pulse width as a function of photon energy. We can see that the attosecond shortwavelength frontier had been identied, but not explored yet, and note the tremendous
advances in that eld have been driven by science and technology developments in many elds
since then.
The Optical Society (OSA) has been at the forefront in promoting ultrafast laser technology through its various journals and conferences. In 1995 a CLEO (Conference on Lasers and
Electro-Optics) tutorial entitled Ultrafast Optical Power Supplies was given by the author
[5], which reviewed the progress of the eld and laid out some of the challenges for laser
304
developers. Figure 2 shows an Ultrafast

Catch-22 that seemed to exist then and
still seems to be true today. With the rapid
developments in source technologies and
materials in the late 1990s, it appeared
that it would be possible to develop compact reliable sources of femtosecond
pulses covering a variety of parameter
ranges; however, few commercial applications had been developed, and therefore
there were few incentives to invest in those
technologies. Figure 3 shows that a wide
range of applications require a wide range
of versatile sources, and no single laser
can satisfy all of them; therefore, individual unit volumes remain low. In 1996 a
plenary talk was given by the author at
Fig. 1. Survey of the ultrafast laser eld in 1994. The shortCLEO titled Ultrafast Epiphany: The
wavelength attosecond frontier had been identied, but not
Rise of Ultrafast Science and Technology
explored.
in the Real World [6]. The Epiphany was
that ultrafast lasers could actually be useful for things beyond the obvious ones in high-speed
measurements. This is indeed the most important consideration about the use of ultrafast laser
technology. In some cases, there may be absolute value in the use of ultrafast laser technology. In such
a case, there is simply no other way to carry out a certain application without the use of femtosecond
lasers. Those cases may not be very numerous. But in most of the other cases, there is competing
technology, and then femtosecond laser technology has to offer enhanced value but at a price that is
commensurate with the increased value that it offers. Most ultrafast laser oscillators still cost
$50$150K today, so they need to add a lot of value to justify that expense.
A number of applications for femtosecond technology were predicted by the author in 1995 and
1996; it might be interesting to see how those predictions have come out. The rst known commercial
application of femtosecond technology was coherent phonon generation and detection for multilayer
thin lm metrology, by Rudolph Instruments in New Jersey. For this, an OEM laser source was
developed by Coherent, Inc. In 1995, the author predicted that a high-power chirp-pulse amplied
femtosecond laser would be mounted on a truck and used by the military forces. Today, indeed such a
truck has been developed and sold by Applied Energetics for detection and detonation of IEDs
(improvised explosive devices). The TeraMobile project has taken atmospheric propagation of
femtosecond pulses truly throughout the globe in search of applications. In 1995, the author
predicted that ultrafast electro-optic sampling systems would be commercially
available, and indeed such systems are
available from Ando and others. In
1996, the author predicted that ultrafast
sources would power new generations of
two-photon microscopes, and several
companies now offer these, including
Zeiss/IMRA and BioRad/Spectra-Physics,
but they are not yet widely used in clinical
practice. In 1995, the author predicted
that someday there would be commercial
terahertz radiation spectrometers. Indeed,
this area has advanced tremendously,
Fig. 2. The incentive to invest in development of practical
with commercial systems available from
real-world femtosecond lasers comes from the applications.
seventeen companies [7]. Applications for
Lasers and applications must be developed in parallel.
Ultrafast Laser Technology from the 1990s to Present
305
terahertz measurements have exploded,

including at least the following: insulating
foam analysis, chemical analysis, explosive detection, concealed weapons detection, moisture content, coating thickness,
basis weight measurement, product uniformity, and structural integrity. In 1996,
however, the author certainly did not predict that ultrashort lasers spanning greater
than one octave range would produce a
revolution in high-precision frequency
measurements, yet that has emerged as an
important new area, and there are now at
least three companies supplying femtosec Fig. 3. The various needs for ultrafast optical laser systems
ond lasers with 6-fs or shorter pulses. In
identied in 1995. A wide range of applications requires a wide
range of laser technology options.
1985, such an experiment was worthy of
the Guinness Book of World Records, but
now it is commercially available. Micromachining in many materials using femtosecond pulses has
developed into a signicant commercial area. In 1996, although there was research in that area, the
author did not predict that it would become commercially signicant. Several companies, including
Clark-MXR, now offer commercial versions of ultrafast manufacturing systems. It should be pointed
out that terahertz systems that are based on femtosecond lasers are currently offered by four
companies; however, thirteen other companies offer terahertz systems based on continuous-wave
sources [7]. Similarly, ultrafast manufacturing systems have to compete with excimer lasers and other
conventional types of advanced manufacturing approaches. Both of these examples illustrate that
while ultrafast laser technology may offer enhanced value to certain applications, the extra cost
involved puts it on a par with competing technologies.
And this leads us to the most important application of femtosecond laser technology to date. One
outgrowth of femtosecond material-damage studies occurred at the University of Michigan in the 1990s
[8]. A very well-developed technology for excimer laser ablation of the human cornea (LASIK) had been
developed, but it required the creation of a corneal ap. A technique was developed using a rapidly
vibrating razor blade to create a corneal incision and horizontal ap that could be lifted off to expose
the middle part of the stroma, which is the tough structural part of the cornea. Ophthalmologists got
used to using the razor blade system, which cost them about $30,000. But it turns out that a new
approach developed involving the use of focused femtosecond light pulses could create a dense array of
microbubbles that, once interconnected, could be lifted like a ap. With this new approach, patients
would not have to worry about their corneas being cut with a razor blade. This technique gained
excellent market acceptance, and with additional benets in enhanced precision of the corneal ap
thickness and positioning, it was found that patients greatly preferred this technology. Over time,
during 2000 and up to the present, it has been rmly established that femtosecond-laser ap cutting is
the one preferred by patients. Ophthalmologists have been able to work out successful business plans
involving the new systems (which cost over $500,000 and have expensive annual maintenance plans).
So, it is clear that one application has risen far above all others in economic value and market
acceptance, and this was unpredictable back in 1996.
Looking to the future of vision correction, a new approach is being developed that does not
involve cutting of the cornea. This technology creates a controlled index of refraction change [911]
using high-repetition-rate femtosecond lasers. It is hoped that this approach will replace much if not
all of currently used refractive correction technologies; however, much work to do remains to be
done.
It is expected that many new areas of application will continue to emerge for femtosecond lasers in
the future. In each case, there will be a denitive test of the value of the new technology, and each one
will be an interesting story. Will we be writing about applications of attosecond technology some day?
Surely we will!
306
References
1. R. L. Fork, B. I. Greene, and C. V. Shank, Generation of optical pulses shorter than 0.1 psec by
colliding pulse mode locking, Appl. Phys. Lett. 38, 671673 (1981).
2. D. E. Spence, P. N. Kean, and W. Sibbett, Sub-100 fs pulse generation from a self-mode-locked
titanium-sapphire laser, in Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, Vol. 7 of 1990 OSA Technical
Digest Series (Optical Society of America, 1990), p. 619.
3. D. E. Spence, P. N. Kean, and W. Sibbett, 60-fsec pulse generation from a self-mode-locked Ti:sapphire
laser, Opt. Lett. 16, 4244 (1991).
4. D. Strickland and G. Mourou, Compression of amplied chirped optical pulses, Opt. Commun. 56,
219 (1985).
5. W. H. Knox, Ultrafast optical power supplies, tutorial presented at Conference on Lasers and ElectroOptics (CLEO) (Optical Society of America, 1995).
6. W. H. Knox, Ultrafast epiphany: the rise of ultrafast science and technology in the real world, in
Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) (plenary presentation), OSA Technical Digest
(Optical Society of America, 1996), paper JMC2.
7. Private communication, X.-C. Zhang and A. Redo-Sanchez, 2012.
8. R. R. Krueger, T. Juhasz, A. Gualano, and V. Marchi, The picosecond laser for nonmechanical laser in
situ keratomileusis, J. Refract. Surg. 14, 467469 (1998), and references therein.
9. L. Ding, R. Blackwell, J. F. Kunzler, and W. H. Knox, Large refractive index change in silicone-based
and non-silicone-based hydrogel polymers induced by femtosecond laser micro-machining, Opt.
Express, 14, 1190111909 (2006).
10. L. S. Xu and W. H. Knox, Lateral gradient index microlenses written in ophthalmic hydrogel polymers
by femtosecond laser micromachining, Opt. Mater. Express 1, 14161424 (2011).
11. L. S. Xu, W. H. Knox, M. DeMagistris, N. D. Wang, and K. R. Huxlin, Noninvasive intratissue
refractive index shaping (IRIS) of the cornea with blue femtosecond laser light, Investig. Ophthalmol.
Vis. Sci. 52, 81488155 (2011).
307
1991-PRESENT
Biomedical Optics: In Vivo and

In Vitro Applications
Gregory Faris
all it what you will: biomedical optics, biophotonics, optics in the life sciences, or lasers
in medicine; light, lasers, and optics have played a tremendous role in biology and
medicine over the last few decades, and this role is growing. This chapter covers
activities on biomedical optics for in vivo and in vitro applications. Additional material on
biomedical optics can be found in the chapter by Jim Wynne on LASIK.
Optical methods are used in medicine and biology for both diagnostics and therapeutics.
Important aspects of optical methods for these applications include the ability to use multiple
wavelengths to perform spectroscopy (i.e., detect or stimulate specic transitions to provide
molecular information) or to perform multiplexing with multi-color probes, the ability to
penetrate tissue (particularly in the near infrared), the ability to produce changes in molecules,
and the potential to produce low-cost and portable instrumentation.
Clinical use of optical methods has a long history. Early methods relied on the observers eye
for imaging through human tissue, with reports of detection of hydrocephalus (accumulation of
cerebrospinal uid within the cranium, 1831) [1], hydrocele (accumulation of uid around the
testis, 1843) [2], and breast cancer (1929) [3]. The advent of the laser and microelectronics
enabled applications such as retinal surgery using argon lasers in the 1960s [4] and pulse
oximetry in the 1970s [5]. However, the largest growth in biomedical optics methods began in
the 1990s, where advances in lasers, image sensors, and genetic modication led to the advent of
many new biomedical optics methods, among them optical coherence tomography (OCT) [6], in
vivo diffuse optical imaging, multi-photon microscopy [7], revival of coherent anti-Stokes
Raman spectroscopy (CARS) microscopy [8], photoacoustic imaging, bioluminescence imaging
[9], green uorescence protein as a marker for gene expression [10], and bioimaging using
quantum dots [11,12].
In Vivo Imaging and Spectroscopy

Optical imaging in tissue generally falls into two classes: those based on unscattered light
(ballistic photons), which can provide very high spatial resolution (on the order of micrometers, i.e., the cellular level) but with limited tissue penetration (on the order of 12 mm), and
those based on scattered light (diffuse imaging), which can provide good tissue penetration
(many centimeters) at the expense of resolution (limited to on the order of 1 cm). Examples of
high-resolution in vivo imaging include OCT, confocal imaging, and nonlinear microscopy.
Examples of diffuse methods include diffuse optical tomography, tissue oximetry, and pulse
oximetry.
In Vivo Molecular Probes and Image Contrast. The ability to perform molecular imaging
or spectral multiplexing is one of the primary advantages of optical methods. For in vivo
imaging, a range of targets is available with endogenous contrast. For absorption measurements, these include most notably oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin (the basis for pulse
oximetry, tissue oxygenation monitoring, optical brain monitoring and imaging, and diffuse
optical tomography), as well as spectral variation of scattering, melanin, bilirubin, and
308
cytochrome oxidase. Endogenous uorophores in vivo

include nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADPH),
avins, collagen, and elastin. Exogenous chromophores
and uorophores in clinical use include uorescein for
retinal angiography and corneal abnormalities, indocyanine
green (ICG) for monitoring vasculature and perfusion,
isosulfan blue for tracing the lymph system, and sensitizers
for photodynamic therapy. More advanced chromophores
and uorophores are under development, including molecular beacons and nanoparticles. The latter can potentially
combine diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities. A signicant hurdle in the use of advanced chromophores in humans
is regulatory approval, though the various advanced contrast agents are currently used in animal studies. There are
several commercial systems available today for optical molecular imaging of small animals.
Diffuse optical imaging in vivo has been pioneered
by Britton Chance (Fig. 1) and others. Signicant application areas of diffuse optical imaging include smallanimal imaging, brain monitoring and imaging, and
cancer detection. In diffuse optical tomography, image
Fig. 1. Britton Chance (The Optical Society
reconstruction is used to produce two- or three-dimen[OSA]). (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives,
sional images from a set of absorption or uorescence
Physics Today Collection.)
images. Dynamic or differential imaging can be used to
enhance contrast from diffuse optical imaging. An example is shown in Fig. 2, which displays an image of
internal organs in a mouse derived from
the dynamics of dye uptake following
injection.
Photoacoustic imaging and spectroscopy combine the relative advantages of
optical and acoustic methods. Absorption
of a laser pulse produces an acoustic wave
that is detected by an acoustic transducer.
This method provides the molecular specicity of optical methods (e.g., localizing
blood vessels through optical absorption
of blood) with the spatial resolution of
acoustic methods, which is superior to that
of diffuse optics. An example of photoacoustic imaging of blood vessels with
optical resolution in a mouse ear is shown
in Fig. 3.
Optical coherence tomography (OCT).
OCT, pioneered by James Fujimoto (Fig. 4)
and others, is an interferometric method for
reectance in vivo microscopy providing
high resolution (approximately a micron) at
depths of approximately a millimeter in bio Fig. 2. In vivo, non-invasive anatomical mapping of internal
logical tissue. Early work on OCT was priorgans in a mouse derived from temporal response of ICG uptake
marily performed in the time domain using
following injection. Nine organ-specic regions are found from the
very-short-coherence light sources [6]. More
different circulatory, uptake, and metabolic responses. (Copyright
2007, Nature Publishing Group.)
recently, spectral domain or Fourier domain
309
Fig. 3.
Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy image of relative total hemoglobin in living mouse ear.
Images show detailed vascular anatomy, including densely packed capillary bed and individual red blood cells
traveling along a capillary in the inset at right [26].
OCT [13] methods using tunable lasers or spectrometers have

been widely adopted because these provide a better signal-tonoise ratio and faster scanning.OCTiswidely used clinically in
ophthalmology, with other applications to endoscopy for
gastrointestinal or cardiovascular applications being
evaluated.
Endoscopy and miniature imaging systems. As image
sensors are produced in smaller sizes for applications such
as smart phones, miniature imaging systems are being
developed. This trend and the use of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) has allowed production of
endoscopes with smaller sizes or with greater functionality
such as higher resolution, better depth penetration, or
molecular imaging capabilities. Miniaturization has enabled other applications such as swallowable pill cameras
that can image the gastrointestinal system and miniaturized imaging systems for imaging brain activity in active
animals [14].
Fig. 4.
James Fujimoto (OSA) (Photo by

Greg Hren, courtesy of RLE at MIT.)
In Vitro Methods
Microscopy. Although microscopy has been a well established method in the life sciences for hundreds of years, the development of lasers and low-noise image
sensors has enabled several advances in microscopy in the last few decades. With ultrafast lasers, it
has been possible to perform nonlinear microscopy with little or no damage to cells. A variety of
nonlinear methods have been applied to microscopy including second and third harmonic generation
microscopy, multiphoton excited uorescence microscopy (pioneered by Watt Webb, Fig. 5, and
others) [7], and nonlinear Raman spectroscopy (including CARS and stimulated Raman spectroscopy) [8,15]. Examples of images acquired using coherent Raman microscopy are shown in Fig. 6.
Nonlinear microscopies have been performed in vivo with excitation wavelengths as long as 1700 nm,
allowing imaging depths of over 1 mm [16].
310
A variety of methods have been applied to improve the

resolution of microscopy beyond the diffraction limit.
Superresolution (the subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry) has been achieved based on nding the centroid
of intermittent dye emission [photoactivated localization
microscopy (PALM) [17] and stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) [18]] or through nonlinearities such as for stimulated emission (STED) [19] or
saturated structured illumination microscopy [20]. Subwavelength information can also be obtained using light to
monitor the proximity between uorophores using Frster
resonance energy transfer (FRET) or metal nanoparticles
(molecular ruler) [21]. Lateral diffusion can be monitored
using uorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP).
Digital holographic microscopy provides both amplitude
and phase images and allows computational reconstruction at different imaging planes.
Genetic modication and control. The DNA of cells or
animals may be modied to produce optical signatures. For
example, the green uorescent protein (subject of the 2008
Nobel Prize in Chemistry) may be spliced into an organism
to provide a uorescent marker for gene expression. Bio Fig. 5. Watt Webb (OSA). (Photograph by
luminescence such as that from the rey can also be used
Charles Harrington. Copyright Cornell
to monitor gene expression. For example, insertion of the
University.)
gene for luciferase into an animal allows imaging of gene
expression by imaging yellow bioluminescence once the luciferin substrate is administered. For
improved penetration in tissue, longer-wavelength versions of uorescent proteins and bioluminescent
substrates are being developed.
Single molecular detection. With the very small illumination volumes available with lasers and
low-noise detectors it has been possible to image single molecules [11]. This allows probing variation
in behavior of individual molecules rather than simply measuring ensemble averages of many
molecules.
Optical tweezers or optical trapping (pioneered by Arthur Ashkin, Fig. 7, and others) [23] has
allowed manipulation of cells or measurement of small forces for the study of molecular motors.
Optical traps have enabled very precise studies of various molecular motors in cells. Recent
developments include multiple optical traps produced using computer-generated holograms and
cell stretching.
Microuidics. Optics forms a natural pairing with microuidics (optouidics) because of the ability
to remotely monitor conditions in microscopic volumes and the ability to use light to produce changes
in the droplet contents or to manipulate or control microuidic transport.
Fig. 6.
Label-free coherent Raman scattering microscopy showing (a) myelinated neurons in mouse brain,
(b) sebaceous glands in mouse skin, (c), single frame of coherent anti-Stokes Raman movie acquired at 30 Hz, and
(d) image of penetration trans-retinol in the stratum corneum. All scale bars are 25 m [27].
311
Other Applications. Optical methods have found other

widespread uses in biomedicine. Examples include immunohistochemistry and uorescence immunohistochemistry
to label specic molecules on tissue sections in pathology,
photolithography and uorescence microscopy to map
gene expression or genotype on DNA microarrays (gene
chips), and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization
(MALDI) for soft ionization of samples for mass
spectroscopy.
Quantum dots are semiconductor nanoparticles for
which quantum connement leads to different colors based
on the nanoparticle size and provides advantages for bioimaging [11,12]. Important qualities for quantum dots are
the lack of photobleaching and wide range of colors that
can be produced. Quantum dots are used for research
including both in vitro and in vivo applications in animal
studies.
Surface plasmon resonance. Surface plasmon resonance, particularly in noble metals, can be used in sensing
and imaging. The resonance of the light eld with the
Fig. 7. Arthur Ashkin. (AIP Emilio Segre
natural frequency of surface electrons at a gold layer is a
Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection.)
powerful method for probing molecular interactions because of the high sensitivity, and no probe molecule is required. This method, commercialized notably
by Biacore, is very widely used in biology laboratories. Surface plasmon resonance of single noble metal
nanoparticles also allows detection of multiple colors using dark eld microscopy.
Correlation methods and particle tracking. A number of other optical methods are well developed
and commonly used in biomedical studies, such as dynamic light scattering and uorescence correlation
spectroscopy for monitoring the size and interactions of small particles such as proteins or micelles. For
particles with stronger scattering, microscopic imaging can provide information on the cells physical
properties or intracellular interactions based on single particle tracking.
Therapeutics and Photomodication

One of the earliest applications of lasers in medicine was the use of argon ion lasers for retinal
surgery. Other ophthalmic therapeutic applications include corrective surgeries such as LASIK and
now ultrafast lasers for assistance in cataract surgery. Photodynamic therapy is used for treatment
of certain cancers. Lasers are widely used for various cosmetic skin therapies including skin
resurfacing, hair removal, vein treatment, acne scar treatment, tattoo removal, and treatment of
port wine stain.
Cellular control and modication. Light may also be used to trigger changes in cells. For example,
light may be used to turn on or off ion channels in vivo based on the proteins such as channelrhodopsin
[24]. In this way light carried by optical bers can activate different portions of the brain in awake
animals. Ultrafast lasers are being used to perform nanosurgery and nanoporation on cells.
OSAs Role in Biomedical Optics

Throughout its history, OSA has played an active role in biomedical optics. The rst issue of the
Journal of The Optical Society of America in 1917 included articles titled The nature of the visual
receptor process and A photochemical theory of vision and photographic action, and this journal
has been a signicant publication for vision research since. As new journals were offered (Applied
Optics, Optics Letters, and Optics Express) these, too, became important journals for
312
instrumentation and techniques in biomedical optics. In 2006, the Society created the Virtual Journal
for Biomedical Optics to collect biomedical optics papers in a single place (Greg Faris, founding
editor). In 2010, OSA initiated a journal dedicated to the eld, Biomedical Optics Express (founding
editor, Joe Izatt). This journal follows the open access, online format of Optics Express. OSA
meetings, including the Annual Meeting (later Frontiers in Optics) and the Conference on Lasers and
Electro-Optics (CLEO) have regularly had signicant content in biomedical optics and vision. A
topical meeting Topics in Biomedical Optics (BIOMED) with heavy emphasis on in vivo methods
was launched in 1994, and OSA is the cosponsor of the European Conferences on Biomedical Optics
(ECBO) together with SPIE. A second meeting, Optics in the Life Sciences, with particular focus on
microscopy, optical trapping, and contrast methods was begun in 2009, occurring in alternate years
with BIOMED.
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314
1991-PRESENT
Novel Optical Materials in the

Twenty-First Century
David J. Hagan and Steven C. Moss
t is a somewhat daunting task to speculate on optical materials for the next century. Before
proceeding, it is perhaps useful to imagine how someone may have tried to write such an
essay 100 years ago. Looking back at volume 1 of the Journal of The Optical Society of
America, discussion of materials was limited to photographic emulsions, metallic lms, and
color lters. Of course, an optical scientist of that time could have had no inkling of the
revolutions that were to follow (lasers, semiconductor electronics, ber optics, to name but a
few) that would transform our concept of optics, give birth to the eld of photonics, and in
many ways redene what we mean by an optical material. Although it is hard to imagine that
the twenty-rst century could be as revolutionary as the twentieth century was for the eld of
optics and photonics, it certain that things will change in ways that we cannot imagine. With
that in mind, this essay focuses on some recent advances in materials that in our opinion are
promising. Whether they will signicantly impact our eld well into the twenty-rst century,
time will tell.
Even in the last few decades, the face of photonic materials research has changed markedly.
Thirty years ago, the eld was dominated by the development of new bulk materials, such as new
IR glasses, nonlinear crystals, or doped laser crystals, while today research in new photonic
materials has more emphasis on advances at the nano or micro scale that can result in materials
with new or enhanced properties. There is also a great deal of research in integration of different
photonic materials for enhanced functionality, resulting in exible photonic platforms, infrared
photonics devices, semiconductor-core bers and integration of III-Vs, organics, or carbon
electronics into silicon electronic platforms. The tremendous growth in the breadth and depth of
the eld of optical materials resulted in The Optical Societys decision to launch a new journal
devoted to the subject, Optical Materials Express, in 2011.
New Optical Materials

Some of the most interesting work in the development of new materials for optics and
photonics is in cases where the newness is related to the physical structure of the material at
the nanoscale, rather than to its chemical structure. One may categorize these into three main
types. In the rst types nanostructuring modies the electronic structure directly producing
new material properties that are quite unlike the bulk, as observed, for example, in plasmonic
nanoparticles; semiconductor quantum dots; or two-dimensional monolayer structures such
as graphene, silicene, germanene, molybdenum disulde, or boron nitride. Graphene is one of
six different basic forms of nanocarbon: graphene, graphite, fullerenes, nanodiamond,
nanotubes, and nanocones. These forms of nanocarbon provide an attractive set of building
blocks for future nanoelectronic and nano-optic devices [1]. Both graphene and carbon
nanotubes are particularly interesting since their optical absorption extends smoothly across
an extremely wide wavelength range, allowing for diverse applications such as infrared
detectors and solar cells. Quantum-conned semiconductors, i.e., quantum wells, wires, and
315
dots, also fall into this category, although

in this case the partial connement
results in relatively small modications
to the electronic properties. Nevertheless,
quantum-well materials have already
become the materials of choice for semiconductor lasers and are the basis of
the important quantum-well infrared
photodetector (QWIP) devices. Quantum
wires and quantum dots offer the possibility of improved laser and detector
materials, while quantum dots also offer
signicant efciency improvements for
solar cells and for displays. Improve Fig. 1. Oblique-view electron micrograph of a woodpile
ments in mid-infrared detector materials
photonic-crystal polymer template (black to dark gray) coated with
based upon advances in strained-layer
Al:ZnO (bright gray.) (Frlich and Wegener, Opt. Mater. Express
superlattice structures and nBn-type
1(5), 883889 [2011].)
structures are also likely.
Nanoscopic metal particles exhibit
properties markedly different from those of bulk metals. These nanoplasmonic materials [2] have
gained a great deal of attention since the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) in the
1970s. Beneting from recent advances in nanofabrication techniques, research in nanoplasmonics has
recently been very successful in using noble metal (especially silver and gold) nanostructures to control
light elds well beyond the limit of diffraction. Such control has already contributed to enhancing light
interaction with tiny amounts of matter down to the single-molecular level. This enhancement, where
the plasmonic particles effectively act as nanoscopic antennas that collect and redirect electromagnetic
elds may nd applications in diverse elds, including infrared detection, solar cells, and nonlinear
optics. Recent work has focused on materials for plasmonics other than silver and gold, including
oxides and nitrides, particularly TiN. Other compounds, alloys, and nanostructured materials are likely
to prove useful for plasmonic applications.
A second category encompasses cases where micro or nano structure provides enhanced functionality of known photonic materials, for example, ceramics and advanced polymer composites. Ceramic
fabrication processes provide the properties of crystals with the functionality of amorphous materials,
enabling large parts to be formed that are relatively strain free and have homogenous doping relative to
single crystals in applications where high thermo-mechanical performance and large apertures are
needed. This is leading to improved laser gain media with superior optical quality, with engineered
index and doping proles that make possible diode-pumped solid-state lasers in the 100-kW range.
Similarly, optical ceramics are now offering advantages in applications such as efcient lighting, solarenergy harvesting, and radiological and nuclear detection. Optical polymer nanocomposites (OPNs),
composites of nanoscopic inorganic particles in a polymer host, have emerged as a promising eld
thanks to advances in optical polymer materials, nanoparticle synthesis, and nanoparticle functionalization and dispersion techniques. OPNs have the potential to fulll a broad range of photonic functions
including highly scattering materials for backlighting of liquid crystal displays, narrowband lters,
integrated magneto-optic and electro-optic devices, and optical amplication and lasing.
Third, metamaterials [2] are periodic composite materials of the type shown in Fig. 1 that may have
bulk properties that are very different from the component materials, for example, negative-index
metamaterials. The origins of this eld can be traced back to research in the 1950s on microwave
engineering for antenna beam shaping; articial materials have recently regained a huge interest
triggered by attractive theoretical concepts such as superlensing and invisibility at optical frequencies.
Metamaterials often employ plasmonic nanostructures, providing a close connection between the two
elds. The strong local elds that occur in these materials can be used to strongly modify the nonlinear
properties of the component materials. For example, second and third harmonic generation (SHG and
THG) may be strongly enhanced and nonlinear optical refraction and absorption may be strongly
316
modied in these metamaterials, since the nonlinearity scales with the electric-eld enhancement to a
higher power.
Advances in Optical
Materials Integration and
Processing
Just as interesting and groundbreaking as the
advances in new materials is the research in integration of different photonic materials for enhanced
Fig. 2. Crystalline-silicon-core optical ber with
functionality, resulting in exible photonic platsilica cladding. (Ballato et al., Opt. Express 16(23),
1867518683 [2008].)
forms; infrared photonics systems; semiconductorcore bers; and integration of SiGe, SiC, SiGeC, and
III-Vs and of organics or nanocarbons into silicon
electronic platforms. Additionally, new processing
methods such as direct laser writing are resulting in
new photonic platforms that were not previously
possible.
Infrared materials are notoriously difcult to
process, causing integrated mid-infrared devices to
be extremely challenging to fabricate. Progress in
development of materials for such applications
has slowly evolved to the point where interesting
integrated devices based on chalcogenides are now
being produced [5]. Chalcogenides, being composed of weakly covalently bonded heavy elements, have bandgaps that are in the visible or
near-infrared region of the spectrum, and low
Fig. 3. A exible microdisc resonator on polymer
vibrational energies make them transparent in the
substrate. (Copyright 2012, Rights Managed by
mid-infrared. They can also act as hosts for rareNature Publishing Group.)
earth dopants. Advances in processing using CHF3
gas chemistry etching have now resulted in As2S3
rib waveguides with losses as small as 0.35 dB cm 1. Chalcogenide bers, although studied since the
1980s, still have not shown improvement over heavy-metal oxides for mid-infrared transmission,
but as ber draw capabilities improve, many other materials are becoming possibilities for bers in
this wavelength range, for example, the demonstration of a ber with a crystalline silicon core,
shown in Fig. 2. Additionally, developments in photonic-crystal bers, where in some cases most of
the optical mode does not overlap with the material, provides yet more avenues for optical bers for
new wavelength ranges using materials for which implementation in traditional bers would be
impossible. As photonics becomes more pervasive in practical systems, researchers are nding
materials platforms for devices and interconnects to meet industry needs. For example, patterning of
photonic devices on mechanically exible polymer substrates has produced high-quality exible
photonic structures, an example of which is shown in Fig. 3.
Laser processing of traditional materials provides yet another avenue for new platforms for devices
and interconnects, even though the materials themselves are not new. For example, femtosecond direct
laser writing [7] relies on nonequilibrium synthesis and processing of transparent dielectrics with shortpulse lasers, which open up new ways to create materials and devices that are not currently possible
with established techniques. The main advantage remains in the potential to realize three-dimensional
(3D) multifunctional photonic devices, fabricated in a wide range of transparent materials. This
317
technique offers enormous potential in the development of a new generation of 3D components for
micro-optics, telecommunications, optical data storage, imaging, astrophotonics, microuidics, and
biophotonics at the micro and nano scale. Another related advance in laser-written photonics
components is photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass, which requires heat treatment to develop laserwritten index changes, usually in the form of gratings. This produces very-high-quality Bragg diffractive
gratings with absolute diffraction efciency in excess of 95%, allowing highly stable volume holographic elements to be fabricated.
In this century, full 3D design at the nanoscale will play an important role in the architectural
design of optoelectronic components. At present, fabrication processing is mostly limited to stacks of
two-dimensional (2D) layers with some coarse modications in the plane. Laser direct writing,
hierarchical self-assembly, and other advances in lithography will allow placement of structures of
pre-determined size and topology at will anywhere within a 3D solid architecture. This will involve
manipulation of single atoms for applications such as quantum computing (e.g., N-V complex in
diamond, P in silicon, SiC, and other materials with defects) as well as structures involving anywhere
from a few atoms to a few dozen atoms for other applications, such as optical modulators, laser
diodes (quantum cascade lasers, QCLs), and nonlinear optical materials [improved SHG, THG,
optical parametric oscillators, and optical parametric ampliers (OPOs and OPAs)].
Summary
Advances in optical materials over the last thirty years have resulted in both evolutionary and
revolutionary advancements of optics, optoelectronics, and photonics. However, this short article
cannot begin to cover the areas that we expect to be impacted by optical materials. Advances in
optical materials have begun to impact biophotonics and biomedicine with promise for improvements
in human health and the treatment of disease [8]. The impact of advanced optical materials on solar
cells is briey discussed above but is not discussed in detail. Advances in manufacturing for
inexpensive solar cell materials including amorphous silicon, materials containing organic dyes,
and nanopatterning may speed their integration into power infrastructure. Work on developing
quarternary and quinternary materials including dilute nitride materials may enhance efciencies in
high-efciency multi-junction solar cells. Advances in optical materials will have a broader impact on
energy consumption and sustainability through development of new, more efcient devices and
applications such as photochromic and electrochromic materials for climate control in buildings and
vehicles. Optical materials, including LCDs and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have led to a
revolution in display technology. This will likely continue, resulting in even better displays, monitors,
and TVs with brighter colors, blacker blacks, better contrast, better resolution, and wider eld of
view using new OLEDs or organic/inorganic composite LEDs incorporating rare earth and other
materials. Polymer and organic/inorganic systems that enable wearable electronics and optoelectronics, including materials for neuroprosthetics incuding retinal imaging, are likely to become
important. In short, we expect advances in optical materials to pervade almost every aspect of human
life. The future of optical materials is bright.
References
1. Feature issue on Nanocarbon for Photonics and Optoelectronics, Opt. Mater. Express 2(6) (2012).
2. Focus issue on Nanoplasmonics and Metamaterials, Opt. Mater. Express 1(6) (2011).
3. A. Frlich and M. Wegener, Spectroscopic characterization of highly doped ZnO lms grown by
atomic-layer deposition for three-dimensional infrared metamaterials, Opt. Mater. Express 1(5),
883889 (2011).
4. J. Ballato, T. Hawkins, P. Foy, R. Stolen, B. Kokuoz, M. Ellison, C. McMillen, J. Reppert, A. M. Rao,
M. Daw, S. Sharma, R. Shori, O. Stafsudd, R. R. Rice, and D. R. Powers, Silicon optical bre, Opt.
Express 16(23), 1867518683 (2008).
318
5. Focus issue on chalcogenide glass, Opt. Express 18(25) (2010).

6. Y. Chen, H. Li, and M. Li, Flexible and tunable silicon photonic circuits on plastic substrates, Sci.
Rep. 2, 622 (2012).
7. Virtual feature issue on femtosecond laser direct writing and structuring of materials, Opt. Mater.
Express 1(5) (2011).
8. N. J. Halas, The photonic nanomedicine revolution: let the human side of nanotechnology emerge,
Nanomedicine (London) 4, 369371 (2009).
319
1991-PRESENT
Quantum Information Science:

Emerging No More
Carlton M. Caves
uantum information science (QIS) is a new eld of inquiry, nascent in the 1980s,
founded rmly in the 1990s, exploding in the 2010s, now established as a discipline for
the twenty-rst century.
Born in obscurity, then known as the foundations of quantum mechanics, the eld
began in the 1960s and 1970s with studies of Bell inequalities. These showed that the predictions
of quantum mechanics cannot be squared with the belief, called local realism, that physical
systems have realistic properties whose pre-existing values are revealed by measurements. The
predictions of quantum mechanics for separate systems, correlated in the quantum way that we
now call entanglement, are at odds with any version of local realism. Experiments in the early
1980s demonstrated convincingly that the world comes down on the side of quantum mechanics.
With local realism tossed out the window, it was natural to dream that quantum correlations
could be used for faster-than-light communication, but this speculation was quickly shot down,
and the shooting established the principle that quantum states cannot be copied.
A group consisting of quantum opticians, electrical engineers, and mathematical physicists
spent the 1960s and 1970s studying quantum measurements, getting serious about what can be
measured and how well, going well beyond the description of observables that was (and often
still is) taught in quantum-mechanics courses. This was not an empty exercise: communications
engineers needed a more general description of quantum measurements to describe communications channels and to assess their performance. These developments led, by the early 1980s,
to a general formulation of quantum dynamics, capable of describing all the state changes
permitted by quantum mechanics, including the dynamics of open quantum systems and the state
transformations associated with the most general measurements. An important advance was a
quantitative understanding of the inability to determine reliably the quantum state of a single
system from measurements.
The 1980s spawned several key ideas. A major discovery was quantum-key distribution,
the ability to distribute secret keys to distant parties. The keys can be used to encode messages
for secure communication between the parties, conventionally called Alice and Bob, with the
security guaranteed by quantum mechanics. In addition, early in the decade, physicists and
computer scientists began musing that the dynamics of quantum systems might be a form of
information processing. Powerful processing it would be, since quantum dynamics is difcult
to simulate, difcult because when many quantum systems interact, the number of probability
amplitudes grows exponentially with the number of systems. Unlike probabilities, one cannot
simulate the evolution of the amplitudes by tracking underlying local realistic properties that
undergo probabilistic transitions: the interference of probability amplitudes forbids; there are
no underlying properties. If quantum systems are naturally doing information processing that
cannot be easily simulated, then perhaps they can be turned to doing information-processing
jobs for us. So David Deutsch suggested in the mid-1980s, and thus was born the quantum
computer.
As the 1990s dawned, two new capabilities emerged. The rst, entanglement-based
quantum-key distribution, relies for security on the failure of local realism, which says that
there is no shared key until Alice and Bob observe it. This turns quantum entanglement and the
320
Fig. 1.
(a) Coding circuit for Shor nine-qubit quantum code. An arbitrary superposition of the 0 and 1 (physical)
states of the top qubit is encoded into an identical superposition of the 0 and 1 (logical) states of nine qubits. (b) Error
(syndrome) detection and error-correction circuit for Shor nine-qubit code. Six ancilla qubits are used to detect a bit ip
(exchange of 0 and 1) in any of the nine encoded qubits, and two ancilla qubits are used to detect a relative sign
change between 0 and 1 in any of the nine encoded qubits. Correction operations repair the errors. The code detects
and corrects all single-qubit errors on the encoded qubits and some multi-qubit errors.
associated failure of local realism from curiosities into a tool. The second capability, teleportation, lets
the ubiquitous Alice and Bob, who share prior entanglement, transfer an arbitrary quantum state of a
system at Alices end to a system at Bobs end, at the cost of Alices communicating a small amount of
classical information to Bob. Surprising this is, because the state must be transferred without identifying
it or copying it, both of which are forbidden. Sure enough, the classical bits that Alice sends to Bob bear
no evidence of the states identity, nor is any remnant of the state left at Alices end. The correlations of
pre-shared entanglement provide the magic that makes teleportation work.
These two protocols fed a growing belief that quantum mechanics is a framework describing
information processing in quantum systems. The basic unit of this quantum information, called a qubit,
is any two-level system. The general formulation of quantum dynamics provides the rules for preparing
quantum systems, controlling and manipulating their evolution to perform information-processing
tasks, and reading out the results as classical information.
The mid-1990s brought a revolution, sparked by discoveries of what can be done in principle,
combining with laboratory advances in atomic physics and quantum optics that expanded what can
be done in practice. The rst discovery, from Peter Shor, was an efcient quantum algorithm for
factoring integers, a task for which there is believed to be no efcient classical algorithm. The second
was a proposal from Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller for a realistic quantum computer using trapped
ions. This proposal drew on a steady stream of advances that promised the ability to control and
manipulate individual neutral atoms or ions, all the while maintaining quantum coherence, and
applied these to the design of the one- and two-qubit gates necessary for quantum computation. The
third discovery, quantum error correction, was perhaps the most surprising and important nding
about the nature of quantum mechanics since its formulation in the 1920s. Discovered independently
by Peter Shor and Andrew Steane, quantum error correction (Fig. 1) allows a quantum computer to
compute indenitely without error, provided that the occurrence of errors is reduced below a
threshold rate.
Denitely a eld by 2000, QIS galloped into the new millennium, an amalgam of researchers
investigating the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum opticians and atomic physicists building
on a legacy of quantum coherence in atomic and optical systems, condensed-matter physicists working
on implementing quantum logic in condensed systems, and a leavening of computer scientists bringing
an information-theoretic perspective to all of quantum physics.
321
Fig. 2.
(a) Linear ion trap. Ions (red) are trapped by a combination of DC and RF voltages. Two internal states of
each ion, labeled 0 and 1, act as qubits. Laser beams (blue) drive quantum gate operations; two-qubit gates are
mediated by the Coulomb repulsion between ions. Readout is by resonance uorescence recorded by a CCD camera:
absence or presence of uorescence signals a qubits 0 or 1 state. The inset shows detection of nine ions. (b) NIST
Racetrack surface ion trap. Made of a quartz wafer coated with gold in an oval shape roughly two by four millimeters,
this trap features 150 work zones, which are located just above the surface of the center ring structure and the six
channels radiating out from its edge. Qubits are shuttled between zones, where they can be stored or manipulated
for quantum information processing. The trap could be scaled up to a much larger number of zones. (Fig. 2(a) courtesy
of R. Blatt, Quantum Optics and Spectroscopy Group, University of Innsbruck. Fig. 2(b) courtesy of J. Amini, Ion
Storage Group, NIST.)
QIS researchers are implementing the fundamental processing elements for constructing a
quantum computer in a variety of systems: ions trapped in electromagnetic elds, controlled by
laser pulses and herded to interaction sites by electric elds (Fig. 2); circuit-QED, in which superconducting qubits are controlled by microwaves in cavities and transmission lines; neutral atoms
cooled and trapped, interacting via cold collisions or by excitation to Rydberg levels; impurity atoms,
vacancies, and quantum dots in semiconductor or other substrates, controlled electronically or
photonically; and photonic qubits processed through complicated linear-optical interferometers,
capable of implementing efcient quantum computation provided that they are powered by singlephoton sources and the photons can be counted efciently. As experimenters develop these basic
elements for quantum information processing, theorists integrate them into architectures for full-scale
quantum computers, including quantum error correction to suppress the deleterious effects of noise
and of unwanted couplings to the external world that destroy quantum coherence. An active research
effort explores the space of quantum error-correcting codes to nd optimal codes for fault-tolerant
quantum computation.
Other researchers investigate exotic architectures for quantum computation, such as topological
quantum computation, which encodes quantum information in many-body systems in a way that is
naturally resistant to error, obviating or reducing the need for active quantum error correction. A prime
candidate uses as qubits the quasi-particle excitations known as non-Abelian anyons, neither bosons
nor fermions, but occurring naturally in fractional quantum-Hall states. Braiding of the anyons is used
to realize quantum gates.
Experimenters verify the performance of quantum-information-processing devices using quantumstate and quantum-process tomography, techniques invented by quantum opticians to identify a
quantum state when one can generate the same state over and over again. The inefciency of these
tomographic techniques drives a search for more efcient ways to benchmark the performance of such
devices.
Computer scientists explore the space of quantum algorithms, searching for algorithms that
perform useful tasks more efciently than can be done on a classical computer and seeking to
understand generally the class of problems for which quantum computers provide an efciency
advantage. One class of problems, present from the beginning of thinking about quantum computers,
322
is the simulation of complex quantum systems, including complex materials, molecular structure, and
the eld theories of high-energy physics.
Quantum communications, the home of much early QIS thinking, now hosts the elds premier
practical application, quantum-key distribution. Secret keys, distributed to distant parties over optical
ber and through free space, are used to encode messages for secure communication. Fundamental
research continues on ensuring security in practical situations; using properties of the data exchanged in
key distribution to guarantee security, instead of relying on an assumption that quantum mechanics is
correct; the design of quantum repeaters, which, by using pre-shared entanglement, can extend the
reach of key distribution beyond the usual limit set by losses in optical ber; and the communication
complexity of distributed information-processing tasks.
The theory of entanglement is used in condensed-matter physics to characterize the ground and
thermal states of many-body quantum systems with local interactions. The degree and locality of
entanglement become important variables for such systems, useful, for example, in characterizing when
the low-energy states of the system can be efciently described and simulated.
From its beginning, QIS has been a productive mixture of quantum weirdness and applications.
The eld has advanced by interplay between experiment and theory: experimental breakthroughs
inspire theorists to dream of what might be, and the dreams of theorists inspire experimentalists to
reduce the dreams to quantum reality. Physicists were forced to quantum mechanics, the highly
successful framework for all of physical law, because the causal, deterministic, realistic narrative of
classical physics fails for microscopic systems. Within the quantum framework, it is not surprising that
one can do things that cannot be encompassed within a classical narrative; QIS is the discipline that
does those things. In a broad sense, QIS is a sort of quantum engineering: though still rooted in
fundamental science, QIS seeks ways to control the behavior of quantum systems and turn them to
performing tasks we want done, instead of their doing what comes naturally.
QIS has burst well outside the bounds of what can be summarized in a brief history. To provide
an illustration of what this means, the author searched the website of Reviews of Modern Physics, the
premier journal for physics review articles, for all articles that have the phrase quantum information
in the title or abstract. The search turned up 26 articles, the rst of which appeared in 1999. These 26
articles collectively have 7,370 citations, 283 per article, and an h-index of 23. Promote the eld to a full
discipline.
There is more. Searching titles and abstracts misses many RMP articles associated with quantum
information, so the author searched the tables of contents of all issues of RMP from 2000 to the end of
2012, adding to the previous list all those articles on quantum information that somehow neglected to
include quantum information in the title or abstract, articles on the foundations of quantum mechanics,
and articles on open quantum systems. This gives 44 review articles since 2000. In the period from 2000
to 2006, there were 16 articles, a rate of 2.6 per year. Since 2007, the pace has accelerated: there have
been 28 review articles in RMP, a rate of 4.7 per year, more than one article per quarterly issue. And
mind you, these are review articles, each of which cites dozens to hundreds of primary research papers.
It is time to stop talking about quantum information science as an emerging eld. A discipline
represented in every issue of RMP is no longer emerging. It has arrived.
323
THE FUTURE
THE FUTURE

Philip Russell
ver the next century it seems likely that glass optical bers, in many as-yet-uninvented
forms, will continue to penetrate more and more deeply into science, technology,
engineering and their applications.
Ultra-Low-Loss Fiber
Perhaps there will be hollow-core photonic crystal bers, with specially treated ultra-smooth
internal surfaces, that offer transmission losses of 0.001 dB/km in the mid-infrared. Such ultralow loss will allow extremely long repeaterless communications spans (perhaps more than
20,000 km) and greatly simplify long-haul communications by rendering the ubiquitous Erdoped ber amplier, with its thirst for expensive pump lasers, largely redundant. All the world's
oceans may then be spanned by single continuous lengths of such ber: Sydney to Los Angeles,
Auckland to Lima, or Sao Paolo to London. The resulting greatly reduced cost of long-haul
communications will make access to the World Wide Web a realistic and cost-friendly possibility
for all the world's populations. Of course, this may also entail the development of a range of new
sources, modulators, and detectors for the mid-infrared, but semiconductor science and technology will certainly meet this challenge.
The extremely low loss of these bers and the lack of optical damage in the empty core might
also allow them to be used in power distribution systems. They will thus replace old-fashioned
electrical power lines, which will vanish from the landscape in many countries, replaced by
underground ber optical power cables carrying light generated by the highly efcient laser
power stations of the future. These high-power bers will be so ultra-lightweight (a 100 km
length with the newest high-strength carbon ber coatings will weigh only 10 kg and have a
transmission loss of 0.1 dB, i.e., a loss of 1%) that they could be suspended vertically in the
atmosphere using computer-controlled balloons placed at regular intervals. Spiraling up into the
sky, they will deliver megawatts of optical power to the Earth's surface from Sun- or fusiondriven lasers in space.
Domestic power outlets of the future may also be based on light, delivered via low-loss
optical bers. Such a power socket might consist of a low-loss optical ber that, when a plug is
inserted, sends a signal to a computer-controlled network specifying the amount of power
required. Fiber power delivery to remote devices, using highly efcient laser diodes, will have
become ubiquitous, providing an elegant and cost-effective replacement for awkward and oftenunreliable electrical supply cables and batteries.
Sensing Systems
In an exotic sensor system of the future, a small sensing particle is picked up using laser
tweezers and propelled into a length (which might be kilometers long) of hollow-core optical
ber. Enclosed and protected by the glass sheath, the particle can be propelled along a exible
path even through harsh environments. It can be held stationary or moved backward and
forward by varying the power ratio between counterpropagating optical modes, and its position
327
monitored using time-domain reectometry or (to interferometric precision) using laser Doppler
velocimetry. It can also be optically addressed in many different ways, permitting sensitive measurements of external parameters with high spatial resolution. A further exotic particle type, made possible
by future advances in semiconductor nanofabrication, is a micrometer-scale optoelectronic microbot
that is powered by the propelling light and capable of sending signals back to the ber input using light
of a different wavelength or perhaps via a radio signal. It will be designed to sense many different
physical quantities, including acting as a small microphone for detecting vibrations in inaccessible or
harsh environments, as a point source for illumination or probing, as a light detector, or as a probe for
local oscillating electric or magnetic elds. Perhaps the microbot could, by varying its orientation (if
non-spherical) or its reection coefcients against the incoming light, swim freely to and fro in the
optical eld upon instructions coded into the counterpropagating laser elds.
In the future it may be essential to monitor radiation levels and other parameters close to the core of
a nuclear fusion reactor. Electronics cannot be used and solid-core bers darken rapidly upon exposure
to high levels of radiation. Flying particle sensors in hollow-core bers will provide a solution: light
generated by a radioluminescent particle is relayed back to the ber input, providing a direct measure of
radiation level, as well as other parameters.
Medicine
Endoscopy systems of the future will be multi-functional, enabling surgeons to carry out keyhole
diagnosis, treatments, and surgery using a thin exible cable containing a multi-core microstructured
optical ber with many advanced functions built into it. Such a ber will be able to deliver drugs
(perhaps photo-activated for treating all kinds of conditions including invasive cancer) in precise
amounts through a hollow channel, transmit many different wavelengths of light appropriate for
diagnosing the health of tissue, deliver selectable wavelengths of high-power laser light for tissue cutting
and blood coagulation, and produce deep-UV light for killing cancerous cells. Each system is likely to
have as standard a multi-mode ber microscope for high-resolution structured light imaging of tissue
at many different wavelengths. It will also have a built-in distributed electrically controllable transducer
system (with feedback provided by optical bend and twist sensors) that will allow the ber to be twisted,
turned, coiled, and bent at the surgeons command.
So there you have ita future where glass bers will play an ever-increasing role in society and
everyday life. Do some of these applications seem outrageous? Just think what has been achieved over
the past half century in optical ber communications. Maybe they are not outrageous enough : : : .
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THE FUTURE

Steven Chu
iels Bohr, the great Dane wisely noted, Prediction is very difcult, especially about the
future, while the American philosopher of the twentieth century, Yogi Berra quipped,
You can observe a lot by just watching. To be asked to write seriously about what
we can expect from light-based technologies over the next hundred years is serious foolishness.
With this caveat, here are some predictions of what light will allow us to see and do in that future.
The interferometers of Michelson of 100 years ago are superseded by matter interferometers
that use light as beamsplitters and mirrors to measure the interference of atom matter-waves. The
precision of the MichelsonMorley experiment 100 years ago saw no measurable shift of
distances l /l 3 10-9 parallel and perpendicular to the motion of the Earth. With atom
interferometers, the precision improves by 19 orders of magnitudethe equivalent of measuring
a change in the distance to the nearest star 3 light years away to one millionth of the width of a
human hair. Gravity-wave astronomy becomes a reality, and spacetime distortions due to
quantum uctuations of the vacuum enlarged during the epoch of ination are mapped directly.
Photostable, near-infrared optical probes smaller than the average protein are routinely used
to label and observe the molecular interactions of RNA strands and dozens of proteins
simultaneously with sub-millisecond time resolution. While tissue is relatively transparent at
these wavelengths, light is strongly scattered. Adaptive optics using multi-megapixel arrays and
ultrafast correction methods are used to restore full optical resolution, peering centimeters into
tissue. Voltage-sensitive versions of these probes record the real-time individual ring of billions
of synapses in the human brain. Coupled with full knowledge of the Human Connectome, we
now understand, at the circuit wiring level and at the molecular level, human consciousness and
self-awareness. This understanding has allowed us to signicantly slow the progression of
various forms of dementia.
Optical probes allow us to track the expression levels and location of the full suite of RNA
expression in time and space within individual cells in live tissue. DNA sequencing identication
methods based on optics help us identify many diseases and greatly reduce misdiagnoses. Optical
methods of understanding the genetic mutations that cause many cancers are routinely used to
develop targeted drug therapies and in helping recruit the human immune system to cleanse the
body of oncogenes with minimal side effects.
To handle the stupendous computing needs of the achievements listed above, quantum
computers, quantum simulators, and nanoscale memory are widely used. We use them to
simulate complex systems with sufcient detail to discover improved room temperature superconductors. We use this computational prowess to understand how our brains perceive and how
we analyze and respond to stimuli, as well as to perform massive simulations that reliably predict
climate change caused by human-generated greenhouse gas emission.
Solar power is the lowest-cost source of energy in many parts of the world. This energy is
beginning to be distributed across oceans via ultra-high DC voltage lines in undersea cables
capable of moving tens of gigawatts of power greater than 4000 km with less than 5% loss.
Regions of the world with poor solar irradiation and reduced winter solar generation are
supplied with clean energy.
Unfortunately, the integrated carbon emission by 2065 was not reduced quickly enough.
With our deeper understanding of climate change, the errors of not heeding early warning
signs are starkly seen. The advanced visible and infrared Earth monitoring sensors and orbiting
329
atom-wave gravity gradiometers allow us to measure with remarkable precision how the climate is
changing. The demonstration of reliable long-term weather predictions allows us to forecast with
condence the climate of 2100 and 2200. Just as exposure to carcinogens such as asbestos or cigarette
smoke can trigger a series of multiple mutations that lead to cancer many decades later, we now realize
that greenhouse gas emissions put our world on an extremely disruptive and destructive course for a
signicant fraction of the population.
Is this last prediction too dire? Possibly, but I also believe there is hope. While science alone will not
change political policy, the massive use of optical technologies will provide compelling evidence (and
compelling predictions) to convince a vast majority of people and governments of the world to make the
necessary investments for future generations. In addition, the near future is ripe with the promise of
understanding the human brain and body at breathtaking new levels, again with optics-enabled
technologies. These advances will not only lead to better health and longer and better life spans. With
our optics-enhanced ability see the future, we will likely observe that global altruism and compassion
will serve our own self-interest exceedingly well.
Of course, what happens beyond 50 years is very difcult to predict. The rst power ight by the
Wright Brothers was in 1903, and we landed men on the moon in 1969. All that can be reliably foreseen
is that there will be many wondrous surprises in optics in the next 100 years.
330
THE FUTURE
The 100-Year Future for Optics

Joseph H. Eberly
he most interesting part of a 100-year future is the last three-quarters of it, following the
arrival of the predictable stuff. Even obvious insights can quickly look sillythink of the
condent predictions of personal airplanes for commuting to work made in the 1930s
and 1940s, while weve managed only bigger highways and longer-lasting trafc jams since then.
Meanwhile, entire generations of music playing systems arrived unpredicted, became universally
adopted, and are already forgotten. How many futurists imagined xerography, or personal
computers, or intelligent telephones that are also cameras and computers, to say nothing of the
FANG teamFacebook, Amazon, Netix, and Google?
What we need is an unconstrained view of the future of optics, and Quantum Optics is nearly
ideal for this because we think we know what it is, but its still far from fully explored. The
meaning of quantum mechanics itself is steadily debated while more and more optical processes
are being given quantum properties. On the near horizon, and easy to connect to current research
themes, one expects to see and possibly benet from optical control of cars and roadways,
photon counting without photon annihilation, wide uses for optical entanglement both quantum
and classical, quantum optical networks for secure identity hacking, the development of
powerful sources of squeezed light, 4-photon down-conversion crystals and quantum-communicating telescope arrays, in addition to inexpensive consumer items such as invisibility cloaks
that will t in ladies purses.
Farther out, but inevitable, will be lethal hand-held optical weapons and wide-area satellite
monitoring of their use. Entirely speculative, but more fascinating, will be fundamental
discoveries employing quantum optical sensitivity, including: (i) experimental proof that a
connection between quantum mechanics and gravity cannot exist, (ii) detection of coherent
quantum opto-galactic signals pervading space, (iii) discovery of the origin of quantum
randomness, (iv) prediction of the longest possible electromagnetic wavelength and its detection,
(v) real-time optics for in-vivo whole-body DNA correction, (vi) verication of the macroscopic
limit to quantum superposition, and (vii) reliable quantum-optical disassembly and recovery of
bio-systems, allowing practical teleportation. In the end, all of these projections will turn out to
be too conventional. To reorient a remark attributed to Steve Jobs, and thinking of Marie Curie,
the optical scientist doesnt know what shell be most thrilled to nd until she nds it.
331
THE FUTURE
Future of Energy
Eli Yablonovitch
ivilization is presently in the hunter/gatherer mode of energy production. Nonetheless,

the continual drop in cost of solar panels will lead to an agrarian model in which energy
that is harvested from the Sun, optically, will satisfy all of societys needs.
Solar panels are optical. By recognizing the optical physics in solar cells, scientists are, for the
rst time, approaching the theoretical limit of 33.5% efciency from a single bandgap.
At the same time, solar panels have dropped in price by a factor of approximately three times
per decade, for the last four decades, cumulatively a 100-fold reduction in real price. Since solar
panels are manufactured in factories under controlled conditions where continuous improvement
is possible, these panels will continue to drop in price until solar electricity becomes the cheapest
form of primary energy (likely to occur around 2030). At that point, solar electricity will become
cheap enough to be converted into fuels, which can be stored summer to winter. The creation of
fuel requires panels that are three to four times cheaper than todays already depressed solar
panel cost, while maintaining the highest efciency.
The highly successful petroleum industry is over 150 years old. It has taken advantage of
technology, but it appears resistant to disruptive technical changes that could sweep it away, as
so many industries have been irrevocably changed or entirely eliminated by the advance of
technology. Nonetheless, the application of solar electricity to create fuel could sweep away the
petroleum exploration industry, which the author calls the hunter/gatherer mode.
Future solar cells will all have direct bandgaps, allowing them to be very thin. The cost of the
material elements composing the cell will be small, since a lm as thin as 100 nm can fully absorb
sunlight using light trapping. Even if the chemical elements were to be expensive, there would be
so little material used in such thin photovoltaic lms that the cost would be low. Indeed, there are
methods to produce free-standing, highest-quality, single-crystal thin lms economically.
The key to high performance from a solar cell is external luminescence efciency, an insight
which has produced record open-circuit voltage and power efciency. This has everything to do
with light extraction, in agreement with the mantra a great solar cell needs to also be a great
light emitting diodeagain the application of optics.
Solar electricity in the open eld will be brought to nearby locations where it will be used for
the recycling and electrolysis of CO2 solutions. There have been great strides in electrolysis,
which can produce various proportions of H2, CH4, and higher hydrocarbons as products. The
carboncarbon bond is particularly prized, since such compounds can be readily converted into
diesel fuel and jet fuel. The study of such selective electro-catalytic surfaces is still in its infancy.
Even if only H2 were ever to be produced, there are industrial methods of using H2 to reduce CO2,
and make useful liquid fuels, among many other products.
The ability to create fuels would increase the size of the photovoltaic panel industry at least
tenfold, allowing the adoption of new cell technology, which is better than the current outdated
1950s crystalline silicon solar cell technology.
Thus we see that the application of optical science in making solar cells more efcient and
lower in cost will produce a revolution in mankinds energy source, playing a role analogous to
the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago.
332
THE FUTURE
Future of Displays
Byoungho Lee
isplays have been created as a way to convey information. From 2D to 3D, display
technology has been evolving to cope with the complexity of the information we try to
deliver. But what comes next? Based on current research progress in the eld, it is
possible to predict that in the next decade we will be reading news from newspaper-like exible
displays with real-time videos (instead of still pictures) and live internet feeds. But if we go even
further and predict what displays are going to be like 100 years from now, we can expect that
displays will substantially affect the way we live.
The year is 2116, and as his windows turn from opaque to transparent, Mark wakes up
feeling the sun in his face. Marks house already knows that he is awake and the coffee is already
brewing. As Mark looks out to an awakening New York, he is presented with the weather
forecast as well as a reminder about his dinner with his girlfriend. While taking his shower, Mark
likes to read the morning news in the shower-box glass door. In the kitchen Mark is distracted by
the football highlights being shown on the table-top display when he gets a call from his mother.
It is a hologram call. She is having trouble with the new robot vacuum cleaner she was given for
Christmas. Mark then activates the 3D interactions mode, and his 3D image appears in his
mothers house where he can show her how to x her problem. Marks smartwatch buzzes,
telling him that he should leave home if he wants to catch the subway on time. He then transfers
the call to his watch and continues to see his mother through his contact lenses. As an architect,
Mark has always struggled to visualize and interact with his creations in three dimensions, so he
is excited to work on his new interactive desk with a built-in volumetric 3D exible transparent
display. To get a better perspective of what a clients structure is going to look like, Mark uses the
virtual reality feature on his contact lenses and walks around the structure xing the last details.
He then invites his boss and clients to his virtual model, where they can look at it together and
talk over details using a 3D virtual reality call. The client is happy, and Mark could not be
happier. He copies the design documents to his foldable transparent screen. Before folding it, he
checks the status of his own house with the display. His house seems a little bit dark. He opens
the curtain with the Internet of Things menu of the display and orders his robot cleaner to clean
the living room. In addition, since he wants to invite his girlfriend to his home after dinner, he
adjusts the temperature of a nice bottle of wine. Now everything is perfect!
Technology development goes faster and faster, and predicting 10 years later often looks
meaningless. However, predicting 100 years later might be easier because a century is plenty of
time to pass through the trial and error stage, and we can expect that what we originally
imagined as a technology will have come true in real life. The whole idea of displaying
information that started from peoples imagination will be implemented, and we might hope
that all the bugs will be worked out in 100 years. Think of a seamless display technology like
perfect, anytime, completely life-like augmented reality, where users see appropriate virtual
images overlapped with real scenes at any time and at any place. 100 years is enough to make that
possible. The only limitation would be the lack of our imagination rather than an incomplete
technology.
333
THE FUTURE
Biomedical OpticsThe Next

100 Years
Rox Anderson
he previous century of biomedical optics strongly suggests that our technology and
capability will be much improved in the next 100 years. Today we have articial light
sources emitting thousands to billions of watts that are routinely used to treat children;
photodynamic therapy drugs designed to hit specic molecular targets; reading an individual
persons genetic code using molecular-optical probes; changing brain functions by inserting lightactivated genes into mammals; and reading human brain activity with light, to name just a few
current capabilities.
But what comes next, next, and next? Some doctors, including this author, have been
accused of being often wrong, but never in doubt. With that caveat, what follows is certainly
what will happen during the next 100 years.
Optical diagnostics will improve, miniaturize, proliferate, become mainstream, replace
conventional biopsies, guide medical and surgical therapy in real time, and then be fully
integrated via the extension of what we now call robotics. Optical systems already provide an
unprecedented combination of high-speed imaging, resolution, point-of-care molecular assays,
and minimally invasive access deep inside the body. By 2040, optical diagnostics will be
comparably as different as todays smart phones are from the telephones of 1985an equal
time gap. What will drive this? At the least, cancer detection, surgical guidance, instant diagnosis
of infections including their antibiotic sensitivity, and the need for common lab tests done quickly
on a single drop of blood, probably as a smart phone app. By 2050, user-friendly optical
diagnostics will be nearly everywhere in medicine, surgery, school, public, and home. Data and
decision analysis will be rapid, highly automated, almost free, and simultaneously personal and
widely shared.
Most of our optical treatments using lasers and light-activated drugs aim to destroy some
undesirable target. But light also stimulates, modulates, heals, controls, or creates. By 2065,
the tables will have turnedmost of the therapeutic realm of biomedical optics will be nondestructive. An early example now is optogenetics. Rhodopsin genes linked to specic promoter
sequences are used to express light-activated action potentials in neuronal systems. The technique
started as a way to study brain function. By 2025, it will provide a cure for blindness from the
genetic disease retinitis pigmentosa. This is just the rst example of a designer optical interface
with our central nervous system. Other examples will hail from the natural and somewhat
enigmatic phenomenon of photobiostimulation, in which light activates mitochondria, the
cellular power plant that produces ATP. Apparently every cell in our bodies has at least one
photoreceptor system, and probably several. During this century, light will be used to activate
much more than transfected neurons, mitochondria, or naturally occurring photosystems. There
will be a steady trend to use light for controlling biological systems. Microscale implanted optical
machines will be developed, powered, and controlled by light. Think, designer tattoos.
Optical technology itself will benet directly and greatly from biology! The rst live-cell laser
was demonstrated only a few years ago. Useful optical components occur in natural organisms,
including waveguides, gain media, energy storage and transfer, charge separation, quantum-level
light detectors at body temperature, and narrow-band emitters. We use a lot of optical devices to
study biology, but the ow of capability between optics and biology is ultimately a two-way
334
street. Can you imagine using optical components that respond to their environment, self-align,
replicate, and/or repair themselves (because they are alive)? This revolution has already started, by
making optical components from natural biomaterials. Some useful optical cyborgs will be around well
before 2115.
The past 100 years has seen a steady trend in optics and electronics, toward smaller and smaller
devices. Enzymes, RNA, and other macromolecules are incredibly agile nanomachines that specically
manipulate other molecules. Combining three current trends of (a) ever-smaller-devices, (b) designer
molecular biology, and (c) near-eld optics, one comes up with diagnostic and therapeutic, nanoscale,
inside-you, optical robots that work in concert with our natural nanomachinery. This will lead to the
design of circulating, biocompatible, harmless, controllable, self-reporting, intervention-capable
cyborgic devices that are the size of your cells or smaller. At the end of this century, such things
will be in clinical trials. It will be impossibleand irrelevantto decide if they are devices, drugs, or
diagnostics. Eventually, even the FDA will stop caring about that.
Energy, global warming, and environmental change are all, at heart, biomedical optics problems.
Evolution came up with photosynthetic algae and forests that are barely 1% energy efcient, yet they
are the only power source for life on the planet (except for a few, very weird organisms). Can we do
better than photosynthesis? A delocalized, efcient, solar-driven, self-repairing, replicating, energygenerating, non-polluting equivalent of photosynthesis is sorely needed. Like it or not, we have become
shepherds of this world. A century ago, Mark Twain famously quoted a friend : : : everybody
complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it! A century from now, global
warming may be viewed as an uncontrolled but positive feasibility experimentyes, we can change the
weather! Other global challenges will be faced and attacked using biomedical optical technologies. By
2115, people themselves may have the option of being photosynthetic. What if food were plentiful and
free? What if people were healthy for a very long time? Traditionally, species populations are controlled
by disease, famine, and unfortunately for us, war. Population control is probably going to be an even
bigger issue in 2115. Maybe biomedical optics will help that, somehow.
Finally, there is optical exobiology. Bioscience has been fundamentally limited by looking at life,
well, here. Optical telescopes are the tool that recently allowed us to detect many other planets, orbiting
many other stars. Exobiology is likely to be a robust science by 2115, and surely it will depend on much
better optics. Someone or some team will use optical spectroscopy to probe whats on those planets.
Telescopes now look at a small patch of sky for a small patch of time, with limited spatial and spectral
resolution. Why not look at all of it, all the time, with detecting life in mind? If life is found, bioscience
will take a giant leap forward thanks to optics.
Biomedical OpticsThe Next 100 Years
335
THE FUTURE

Robert L. Byer
he year 2015 was declared by the United Nations to be the International Year of Light
and light-based technologies. The opening ceremonies not only celebrated the present but
also acknowledged the past and hinted at what was in store for the future. In the modern
world, 50 years after the demonstration of the laser, light impacts everything we do from
communicating, to manufacturing, to health care. This is not surprising, because 50 to 100 years
is the adoption cycle of a new technology for widespread use by society. Just think for a moment
about railroads, electrication, air transportation, the national highway system, electromagnetic
communication from the radio, television, and the Internet.
So what about the future of lasers and laser technology? We are now six years into the x-raylaser age, and x-ray lasers based on linear accelerators are being constructed around the world.
What will the characteristics and applications of the x-ray laser be 50 years from now? We can
expect that, like the radio and the laser, in 50 years the x-ray laser will be integrated into wide use
by society in applications such as precision medical imaging, protein structure determination,
and coherent transmission of information at rates 105 times higher than with visible light. We can
also expect advances in x-ray power that will allow for controlling matter at the high densities
suitable for small-scale inertial fusion power generation. The eld of x-ray nonlinear interactions
will be extended from x-ray to gamma ray frequencies suitable for probing nuclear energy levels
and for pumping gamma ray lasers.
Laser-driven accelerators will open up a host of applications in the future. Going from
Klystrons to laser-driven accelerators reduces physical device scale by 5 orders of magnitude.
Accelerators could even be made as all-solid-state devices on a wafer scale. For example, a fewcentimeter-long accelerator will generate MeV-energy electrons at a mode-locked laser repetition
rate of 100 MHz and would be ideal for treating patients. Such an accelerator, if tted into a
catheter, would revolutionize radiation medicine. This same technology could enable an all-solidstate scanning electron microscope of centimeter length that is driven by compact ber lasers.
A 1-m laser accelerator with 1 GeV electrons of 10-attosec duration at a 100-MHz repetition
rate is ideal for driving a free-electron laser (FEL) that operates at x-ray frequencies. The 100MHz repetition rate allows the consideration of an FEL laser with a resonator to match the 100MHz period. Using, for example, diamond mirrors, this sync-pumped FEL opens the door to
upconverting a comb of modes from the visible to x-ray frequencies. This in turn leads to
opportunities for precision clocks, precision spectroscopy, and attosecond-timing resolution
measurements in the hard-x-ray region, as well as eld strengths adequate to ionize the vacuum.
Imagine the vacuum as the ideal nonlinear medium for future experiments.
High-average-power lasers have opened the door to new applications. As the power level
increases in the future to approach and exceed the 1-MW level, new and surprising applications
are enabled. For example, a laser of 15-MW average power operating at 100 pulses per second,
located on the ground, will enable the launching of satellites into low earth orbit, each with a
mass of greater than one ton. A laser of 35-MW average power operating at a 15-Hz repetition
rate is ideal for driving a laser inertial fusion power plant with a 1-GW electrical output. When
that happens, laser energy will become the carbon-free energy of choice: stars burning under
control on the surface of the earth.
In the future, if laser propulsion were used to launch hundreds of 2-m-diameter telescopes
and the telescopes were directed into formation as a constellation of satellites, then optical
336
telescopes of 1000-m diameter and greater would be possible. How would these mirrors be aligned?
Again the laser offers the solution through the use of precision clocks and precision interferometry to
locate each 2-m mirror to better than 1/100 of an optical wave in spacetime. Such a telescope array
would enable detailed studies of exoplanets using precision spectroscopy based on laser frequency
combs.
It seems appropriate that in 2060, 100 years after the demonstration of the laser, the amazing laser
will continue to serve society across multiple dimensions from energy to manufacturing to health and
the environment.
337
THE FUTURE
Optical Communications:
The Next 100 Years
Alan E. Willner
ver the past few decades, the eld of optical communications has produced astounding
scientic and engineering feats. In addition, it has helped transform the way society
functions since the Internet as we know it could not exist without it. Given the exciting
nature of optical science and the ubiquity of communications in our world, there is much reason
to hope that this rate of technical progress and impactful applications will continue for many
decades to come.
The following predictions might capture the future of our eld, or just tickle the imagination.
We know that technological advances have made the transmission of enormous amounts of
data across the planet commonplace, with the exponential growth in capacity continuing into the
future. Many past advances in transmission capacity have utilized the multiplexing of multiple
data-carrying optical waves with each beam inhabiting a unique optical parameter, such as is
done with different wavelengths. Although recent research experiments have shown signicant
capacity increases due to space-division multiplexing, we are just scratching the surface. Basic
optical science tells us that the spatial domain has an enormous number of orthogonal spatial
states, and we will nd new ways to exploit space to enable many orders of magnitude
improvement. Whatever the technology, we will have an endless cycle of thinking we have
enough capacity followed by the panic of needing more, followed by innovation. We will be
feverishly following a Moores Law-like growth, and always worried that we are coming to
fundamental physical limitsbut not.
We are always intrigued by the single photon itself. Present single-photon systems are fairly
limited in terms of data rate, transmission distance, complexity, and cost. However, utilizing
future advances in quantum repeaters and high-speed single-photon sources and detectors, we
will be able to control and communicate using single photons for many types of low-power, longdistance, and secure systems.
It is quite likely that advances in the coming decades in the performance and mass
production of photonic integrated circuits will enable optics to be ubiquitously deployed
wherever and whenever it can bring benet to the system, just as we use electronic integrated
circuits today without thought. Furthermore, optics will bring low-loss and high-bandwidth
connections between and within computer chips. Furthermore, with future advances in highly
nonlinear devices, optics will perform specic signal processing operations and logic functions
alongside electronics to enable higher speed and lower power consumption, such that electronics
and optics will be used in a hybridized and harmonized fashion. In some applications, optics will
not even need electronics to process data.
Optical networks have enabled many users to communicate with each other very efciently.
However, these networks are still made up of discrete nodes, such that data is sent away from one
node and independently received by a different node, without different nodes actually interacting as
a single unit. Indeed, think of a computer chip. It is a brain, with many operations occurring in
parallel but all working toward a single end goal. With advances in highly accurate optical clocks,
networks covering large geographic areas will be designed to act like a large computer brain and
synchronously communicate and process data efciently. Distances will truly disappear.
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For the past 100 years, radio has been king of the free-space communications world, with optics
barely registering an impact. However, with the constant increase in needed capacity, optical links will
become commonplace. Indeed, with the future ubiquity of solid-state lighting, almost any bulb can be
used for communications.
Sir Charles Kao, the Nobel Laureate credited with proposing that low-loss glass can be used for a
communication system, had said that silica might last 1000 years as the medium of choice. So, going out
on a limb, is it possible that silica ber will give way to a new material with lower loss and lower
nonlinearity? Such materials have been envisioned, and the economics may one day demand that a new
type of ber be adopted and laid around the world.
Since there has been exponential growth in the ber transmission capacity and the demand for that
capacity, our eld is now cemented as being essential for economic and societal growth. For the past few
decades, ber transmission capacity has increased 100 every decade. We have seen names y
byMega, Giga, Tera, and now even Petabits/sec on a single ber. Will this continue? In 100 years and
ifa big if!advances continue at the same pace, we will see words like Exa, Zetta, Zotta, and even
Brontobits/sec (1027 bits/sec). It is thrilling to imagine the enabling technologies and potential
applications for such capacity.
If past is prologue, either the above-mentioned or other transforming advances will occur. If this
happens, the exponential growth in the capacity of communication systems will enhance our ability to
interact with each other, our environment, and machines in unforeseen ways.
Optical Communications: The Next 100 Years
339
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics designate illustrations and captions.
A-1 camera, 66
Abbe, Ernst, 9, 14, 23, 35
Abbe number, 266
Abels, Florin, 72
Abella, Isaac, 82, 84
achromatic lens, 13
achromatic optics, 14
Acrysof Toric, 264
Adams, Ansel, 35
Adams, E.Q., 43
Adams, Paul, 149
adaptive optics, 29, 151, 178, 184, 247,
248, 248, 329
additive-pulse mode locking (APM),
241, 242
Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-wave Observatory),
12
Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA), 82, 100, 149, 150,
185187, 282
Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility
(AXAF), 249
AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), 29,
161
aerial cameras, 24, 25, 66
aerial reconnaissance. See spy satellites;
surveillance imaging
AFCRL (Air Force Cambridge Research
Laboratory), 186, 187
AFM (atomic force microscopy), 225226
AFWL (Air Force Weapons Laboratory),
185, 186
Agrawal, Govind, 277
Aigran, Pierre, 107
Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory
(AFCRL), 186, 187
Air Force Ofce of Scientic Research, 29
Air Force Weapons Laboratory (AFWL),
185, 186
Airborne laser, 151
Airborne Laser Laboratory, 93, 150
Airy, George, 15
Akhmanov, Sergey A., 116
Alcatel, 197, 285
Alcatel Thomson Gigadisc, 139
Alcon, 263, 264
Alfalight Inc., 230, 231
Alfano, R.R., 117, 238
Alferness, Rod C., 277, 287
Alferov, Zh. I., 110, 111, 111, 201
AlGaAs, 110, 200
AlGaAs/GaAs, 110111
AlGaAs lasers, 202, 228
Allen, Lew, 143, 250
Alpha laser, 151
Alvan Clark and Sons, 14
Alvarez lenses, 267
American Cystoscope Makers, 56
American Film, 31
American Marconi Co., 26, 175
American Optical Co., 10, 15, 51, 55, 56,
100, 101102, 104, 150, 185, 186,
187, 280
American Physical Society, 86, 107, 178
American Telephone & Telegraph Co.
(AT&T), 25, 26, 100, 197, 278, 279,
281, 282, 283, 297
ammonia maser, 50, 81, 82
AMO, 263, 264

Ampex Corp., 140
Anastigmat lens, 33, 35
Anderson, Jim, 177
Anderson, Rox, 334
Ando, 305
Andreev, Vyacheslev M., 111, 111
Andrus, J., 50
Angel, Roger, 246, 248, 250
ngstrom, Anders, 12, 13
Antares project, 167, 168
anti-reection coatings, 3, 49, 69, 70,
7172, 73, 266
anti-resonant reecting optical
waveguiding (ARROW), 297
APDs (avalanche photodiodes), 288
APM (additive-pulse mode locking), 241,
242
apochromat objective, 14
Apple Computer, 140
Applied Energetics, 305
applied nonlinear optics, 213217,
214217
Applied Optics (journal), 195, 312
Applied Physics Letters (journal), 84, 95,
191
applied spectroscopy, 20, 4950
argon-uoride laser, 92
argon-ion lasers, 91, 91, 95, 96, 98, 196,
225, 234
argon-mercury discharge, 91
Argonne National Laboratory, 29
Argyros, Alex, 299
Armand, M., 90
Armstrong, John, 115, 219
Army Research Ofce (ARO), 29, 178
Arnold, George, 163
ARO (Army Research Ofce), 29, 178
ARPA (Advanced Research Projects
Agency), 82, 100, 149, 150,
185187, 282
ARPANET, 279
arrayed waveguide grating (AWG), 293,
294
ARROW (anti-resonant reecting optical
waveguiding), 297
Artal, Pablo, 263
Arzamas-16, 166
Asai, Kazuhiro, 175, 179
Aschenbrenner, Claus, 159160
Ashkin, Arthur, 119, 220, 222, 223226,
311, 312
Ashura laser system, 167
Asterix laser system, 166
astigmatism, 15, 253, 262, 264, 266, 267
astronomical spectroscopy, 13, 13
astronomy, 4, 9, 71, 184
Cats Eye Nebula, 18
ber-based astronomy, 301
gravity-wave astronomy, 329
ground-based telescopes, 244248,
245248
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), 4, 13,
143, 184, 247, 249250, 250, 251,
252
laser guide star, 4, 29, 178, 247, 248,
248
mirrors, 69, 245, 247, 251, 252
optical astronomy, 184, 247, 248, 249,
252
Orbiting Astronomical Observatory

(OAO), 247, 249
refractors, 14
space telescopes, 249252, 250, 251
spectroscopy and, 13, 13, 1819
stellar interferometers, 247
stellar spectra, 13
See also telescopes
AT&T (American Telephone and
Telegraph Co.), 25, 26, 100, 197,
278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 297
AT&T Bell Laboratories, 197
Atchison, David, 263
atom interferometers, 329
atom trapping, 224, 225
atom-wave gravity gradiometers, 330
Atombau und Spektralinien
(Sommerfeld), 17
atomic clocks, 226
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC),
29, 161
atomic force microscopy (AFM),
225226
atomic physics, spectroscopy and,
1213, 13
atomic structure
quantum theory, 3
subshells, 17
Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines
(Sommerfeld), 17
Atomic-Vapor Laser Isotope Separation
(AVLIS) program, 162, 163, 163,
164
Auston, D., 221
auto industry, 51
Autochrome plates, 34
automatic exposure (AE) control, 36
automatic tristimulus integrator, 43
avalanche photodiodes (APDs), 288
AVCO Everett Research Laboratory, 92,
150, 161, 187
AVLIS program, 162, 163, 163, 164
AWG (arrayed waveguide grating), 293,
294
AXAF (Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics
Facility), 249
azimuthal quantum number, 1, 7
Babinet, Jacques, 53
Baird, John Logie, 53
Baker, James G., 49, 6467, 245
BakerNunn camera, 245
Ball Aerospace, 250, 252
ballistic photons, 308
Balmer, Johann, 13
Balmer formula, 13
bandwidth, 4, 191192, 211, 280, 291
Banning, Mary, 71
The Bar Code Book (Palmer), 133
barcode scanners, 128, 129133, 130132
barcodes, 128133
scanners, 128, 129133, 131, 132
symbologies, 128129, 129, 130
Bardeen, John, 62
Barger, R.L., 219
Barnack, Oskar, 3435
Barnack camera, 35
Basov, N.G., 107, 218
Index
341
Bass, Michael, 183, 218, 219

Bates, Frederick J., 27
Battelle Memorial Institute, 57, 6061
Battista, Albert, 102
Baumeister, Philip, 73
Bausch, John Jacob, 15
Bausch & Lomb, 10, 15, 23, 24, 25, 33,
70, 71, 72, 185, 253, 254, 256
BBO (beta barium borate), 215
BEACON HILL Report, 65
BEACON HILL Study Group, 64
Beckman, 50
Beecher, William, 15
Belforte, David A., 124
Bell, Earl, 89, 90, 97, 98
Bell and Howell, 15
Bell Holmdel Laboratory, 185, 186, 224
Bell inequalities, 320
Bell Telephone Laboratories, 25, 50, 81,
82, 84, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 100, 104,
105, 114, 116, 177, 185, 186, 196,
199, 201, 204, 205, 215, 218, 223,
227, 232233, 239, 240, 278, 284,
297, 304
Bennett, William, 82, 84, 88, 89, 89, 91
Benton, Steve, 122
Berg, Howard, 225
Bernard, M.G., 107
Berns, Roy S., 10, 43
beta barium borate (BBO), 215
Bevacqua, S.F., 109
Biacore, 312
bifocals, 14, 184, 253, 254, 263, 265, 266,
268
Big Bird, 156, 158
Big Demonstration Laser, 150
binary phase shift keying (BPSK)
modulation, 294295
binoculars, 14, 24, 71
bioluminescence, 311
BIOMED meeting, 313
biomedical optics, 277, 308313,
309312, 334335
See also ophthalmic surgery; vision
correction
Biomedical Optics Express (journal), 313
BioRad/Spectra-Physics, 305
Birks, Tim, 299, 300
Bison (Soviet bomber), 65
Bissell, Richard, 65, 157, 158
Bjorkholm, John, 224, 225, 226
blackbody radiation, 3, 12
BlazePhotonics, 300
Blikken, Wendell, 119
Block, Steven, 225
Blodgett, Katharine, 70
Bloembergen, Nicolaas, 115, 115, 213,
214, 221
Bloom, Arnold, 89, 90, 97
Blu-Ray, 142, 142
Blum, Samuel E., 257, 258, 259, 260, 261
Boeing, 150, 151, 185
Bohr, Niels, 3, 13, 17, 329
Bohr atom, 3, 13, 17
Boll, Franz Christian, 41
BOMEX project, 98
Bond, W.L., 6
Borde, C., 220
Bortfeld, Dave, 95
BoseEinstein condensation, 219, 221,
225
Boston University, 85
Boston University Optical Research
Laboratory (BUORL), 65
Botez, Dan, 227, 231, 231
Bowen, Ira S., 18, 18, 20, 245
Boyd, Robert, 117
BPSK modulation (binary phase shift
keying modulation), 294295
342
Index
Brackett, Frederick Sumner, 18

Bradbury, Rudolph, 186
Bragg bers, 297, 298
Brandeis University, 186
Braren, Bodil, 260
Braunstein, Maurice, 187
Brazier, Pam, 122, 122
Breckinridge, James, 244, 246, 249, 250
Brewster, David, 11
Brewsters angle, 91, 97, 169
Brewsters angle slab amplier, 168169,
169
Bridges, William B., 8893, 91, 98, 187
Brillouin scattering, 116
British Telecom Research Laboratories,
197, 278, 280
Brody, Peter, 270
Bromberg, Joan Lisa, 103
Browell, Ed, 175
Brown, Gordon, 145
Brown University, 186
Brownell, Frank A., 32
Brownie camera, 10, 3132, 32
Buccini, John, 143
Bufton, Jack, 175, 179, 180
Bunsen, Robert, 13
BUORL (Boston University Optical
Research Laboratory), 65
Burbank Skunk Works, 157
Bureau of Standards, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27,
43, 185
Burnham, R.W., 44
Burns, Gerald, 108, 108
Burns, Keivan, 20
Bush, Vannevar, 27, 28, 28, 29, 185
Byer, Robert L., 103, 213, 214, 336
C-camera, 66, 67
C-series contact lenses, 253
Cabellero, Doris, 72
cadmium selenide, 270
calcium, spectrum, 18
Caltech, 86, 297
Cambridge Research Laboratory, 185, 186
camera lenses, 3, 33, 35
cameras, 10, 15, 3336, 36, 37
A-1 camera, 66
aerial cameras, 24, 25, 66
automatic exposure (AE) control, 36
BakerNunn camera, 245
Barnack camera, 35
Brownie camera, 3132, 32
C-camera, 66, 67
Contax I, 33, 3536, 36
Deckrullo focal plane shutter cameras,
35
Faint Object Camera (FOC), 250
Fairchild K-19, 66
lm, 10, 15, 34, 39, 51, 52
folding Pocket Kodak (FPK),
3233, 32
Homos stereo camera, 34
K-19 camera, 66
Kodak Retina camera, 36
Leicas, 3335, 35
lenses, 3, 33, 35
Miroex reex camera, 35
Model A, 35
Pocket Kodak, 32
Polaroid process, 49, 52, 158
Polaroid SX70 camera, 64
reconnaissance cameras, 6467
Schmidt camera, 4, 244, 245
Simplex camera, 34
Super Kodak Six-20, 3637, 36
35-mm precision cameras, 34
Tourist Multiple camera, 34
Universal Jewel professional folding dry

plate camera, 35
Wide-Field Planetary camera (WF/PC),
250
See also photography; surveillance
imaging
Campillo, Anthony, 299
Canon, 62, 63
carbon dioxide lasers, 9293, 92, 102,
124, 150, 163, 167, 168, 186, 187
carbon monoxide lasers, 92
carbon nanotubes, 315
Carl Zeiss Co., 69
Carl Zeiss Foundation, 35
Carl-Zeiss Stiftung, 23
Carlson, Chester, 50, 57, 58, 5960, 61,
61, 62, 134
Carlson, R.O., 108
Carnegie, Andrew, 244, 246
carotenoids, 41
carrier frequency sweep, 215
carrier leakage, 229
Carritol, Dick, 154
CARS spectroscopy (coherent anti-Stokes
Raman spectroscopy), 219, 308
Carswell, Alan, 177
Cartwright, Charles Hawley, 69, 70, 71
Case Western Reserve University, 244
Cataln, Miguel A., 17
cataract surgery, 124, 184, 262264, 312
cathode ray tubes (CRTs), 269
Cats Eye Nebula, 18
Caves, Carlton, 277, 320
CDs (compact discs), 138, 140, 141, 141,
142
cellular control, 312
cellulose nitrate lm, 15
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 55, 65,
153, 157
Central Laser Facility, 235
Centre National de la Recherche
Scientique, 72
ceramic fabrication processes, 316
ceramics, 97, 124, 171, 221, 234, 316
CERN (European Center for Nuclear
Research), 279
CGHs (computer generated holograms),
145
CGRO (Compton Gamma Ray
Observatory), 249
chalcogenide bers, 317
chalcogenides, 317
Chan, Kin Pui, 180
Chance, Britton, 309, 309
Chandra X-ray Observatory, 249, 251,
251
Chanin, Marie, 177178
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, 86
Charman, William, 265
Chebotayev, V., 220
chemical elements, 19, 21
chemical lasers, 93, 150, 151
chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL), 151
Chemla, Daniel S., 304
Chen, Chuangtian, 214, 215
Chiao, Ray, 116
chirp, 117, 171, 215, 224, 238, 288
chirp-pulse amplied femtosecond lasers,
305
chirped-pulse amplication, 235, 242, 304
Chraplyvy, Andrew, 211
chromatic dispersion, 211, 280, 283, 288
chromophores, 309
Chu, Steven, 220, 221, 221, 222, 224, 225,
329
Churchill, Winston, 205
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 55, 65,
153, 157
CIBA VISION, 254
CIE system, 43, 44

CIECAM02, 44
CIECAM97s, 44
Cirac, Ignacio, 321
CL-282 (aircraft), 65
Clark, Alvan, 14
Clark, Harold, 57
Clark-MXR, 306
CLEO (Conference on Lasers and ElectroOptics), 178, 237, 259, 279, 285,
300, 304, 305, 313
climate change, 329330
coatings
7172, 73, 266
interference coatings, 6870
mirrors, 68, 69, 187, 245, 329
optical coatings, 3, 6873, 142
COBE space telescope, 252
Coble, Robert, 234
Code, Art, 249
Cohen-Tannoudji, C., 221, 221, 225
coherent anti-Stokes Raman (CARS)
spectroscopy, 219, 308
coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy
(CARS) microscopy, 308
Coherent, Inc., 102, 305
Coherent Laser Radar Conference, 178
coherent lidar, 178
coherent light, 79, 88, 98, 107, 108, 114,
119, 213, 214
coherent optical communication, 210,
211, 294295, 295
coherent phonons, 305
coherent population trapping, 217
Coherent Technologies, 178
coherent Raman microscopy, 310, 311
COIL (chemical oxygen-iodine
laser), 151
Cold War, 4950, 52, 85, 116, 151, 156,
157, 164, 199
See also spy satellites; surveillance
imaging
Colladon, Daniel, 53
colliding-pulse mode-locked (CPM)
geometry, 239240
colliding pulse mode-locked lasers, 304
color-center lasers, 215, 241, 333
color-matching function data, 43
color measurements, standardization, 10
color order system, 43
color photography, 3, 10, 33, 34
color printing, 10
color science, 4344
color television, 270
Colorado State University, 178
colorimetry, 43
Columbia Electronics Research
Laboratory, 86
Columbia Radiation Laboratory, 85
Columbia University, 30, 40, 81, 84, 85,
86, 197, 219, 261
Columbia University Harkness Eye Center,
260
Commissariat a lEnergie Atomique,
169, 170
Committee on Medical Research
(CMR), 27
communications, 327
bandwidth, 4, 191192, 211, 280, 291
coherent optical communication, 210,
211, 294295, 295
continuous-wave (CW) room-temperature diode lasers, 199202, 200, 201
data transmission, 196, 215, 279280,
279
erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA),
195198, 196198, 210, 230, 277,
280, 281, 288
ber-optic communications, 4, 50,

209210, 210, 227, 230, 278281,
279, 281
future trends in, 338339
Internet, 4, 63, 133, 142, 191, 193, 207,
211, 277, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285,
286, 287, 333
low-loss bers for, 189193, 190193,
241, 282
modems, 279, 282
optical communications networks, 183,
186, 189, 193, 195, 199, 205, 209
211, 215, 237, 277, 289292, 289,
290, 338
quantum communications, 323
telecommunications industry, 282286
telephony, 26, 203207, 204, 206, 207,
279, 282
terabit-per-second ber, 209211, 210
World Wide Web, 279, 282
compact discs (CDs), 138, 140, 141, 141,
142
Compton, Karl, 27
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory
(CGRO), 249
computer generated holograms (CGHs),
145
computers
personal computers, 135, 141, 279,
282, 331
quantum computers, 320323, 329
Conant, James B., 27
condensed-matter physics, 3, 206, 323
Conference on Electron Device Research,
88
Conference on Laser Radar Studies of the
Atmosphere, 178
Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics
(CLEO), 178, 237, 259, 279, 285,
300, 304, 305, 313
Conrady, Alexander Eugen, 33
contact lenses, 183, 184, 253256, 254,
255, 260, 262, 333
Contax I camera, 33, 3536, 36
Contessa Nettel, 36
continuous-stream inkjet, 62
continuous wave argon-ion laser, 98
continuous-wave (CW) dye lasers, 9596,
103, 161
continuous-wave femtosecond laser
systems, 239242, 241
continuous-wave (CW) room-temperature
diode lasers, 199202, 200, 201
continuous wear contact lenses, 254255,
256
Convert, G., 90
Coolidge, William, 24
Copernicus mission, 249
copiers, 57, 6263, 134
xerography, 5763, 5861, 134137,
136, 137
copper-vapor lasers, 96, 163, 240
copper-vapor pumped dye lasers, 163, 164
Cornell, Eric, 221, 225
Cornell University, 186
Corning, 189, 190, 191, 199, 267, 277,
278, 280, 284, 300
Corning Glass Works, 24, 245, 248
CORONA program, 52, 65, 79, 153,
157160, 159
coronium, 19
COSTAR optical system, 250
couching, 262
Cox, Ian, 253
Cox, Palmer, 32
CPM (colliding-pulse mode-locked
geometry), 239240
Cross, Lee, 100
Cross, Lloyd, 122
Cross, Lowell, 100

Crosswhite, H., 218
CRTs (cathode ray tubes), 269
CRU International, 280
Crystalens, 264
CSF, 90, 91
Cummings, Stuart, 264
Cummins, Herman, 82
Currie, Mal, 88, 89
Curtiss, Lawrence E., 50, 55, 56
custom wavefront-guided laser
refractive surgery, 261
Cyclops laser, 168
Dagor lens, 33
Daguerre, Louis Jacques Mand, 31
Dlibard, J., 221
Danalens, 255, 255
Danielmeyer, H.G., 105
dark-eld microscope, 312
dark-line defects (DLDs), 203
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency), 29, 151, 282
DAsaro, Art, 201
DAST (4-dimethylamino-N-methyl-4stilbazolium), 215
data transmission, 196, 215, 279280,
279
Daukantas, Patricia, 9, 10, 17, 38
Davidson, Gil, 179
Davis, Doug, 177
Day, Clive, 298, 299
Day, D.A., 157
Dayton, Russell, 60
DCFs (dispersion-compensation bers),
211
death ray, 149
Deckrullo focal plane shutter cameras, 35
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), 29, 151, 282
Dehmelt, H.G., 220
Deln laser system, 167
Delfyett, P.J., 241
DeLoach, B.C., 207
Delta laser, 168
DeMaria, Tony, 186, 237
dementia, advances in treatment, 329
Denisyuk, Yuri, 121
Denton, Richard, 70
Department of Energy (DOE), 29, 164
Depot of Charts and Instruments, 26
Derr, Vernon, 178
designer optical interfaces, 334
Dessauer, John, 57, 6162, 61
Desurvive, Emmanuel, 197, 210
Detch, J.L., 91
Deutsch, David, 320
Devlin, G.E., 104
Dexheimer, John, 285
DFB (distributed feedback) lasers, 288,
293
DHaeens, Irnee, 79, 83
DIAL system (Differential-Absorption
Lidar system), 175
Dieke, G., 218
Dietz, R.E., 105
Differential-Absorption Lidar (DIAL)
system, 175
diffraction, 69
diffraction grating, 12
diffuse optical imaging in vivo, 309
digital holographic microscopy, 311
digital signal processing (DSP), 211
Digonnet, Michel, 195
Dill, Frederick H., Jr., 108, 108, 109
4-dimethylamino-N-methyl-4-stilbazolium
(DAST), 215
Index
343
diode-laser bars, 229

diode laser-pumped solid-state lasers,
105106
diode lasers, 105
continuous-wave room-temperature
diode lasers, 199202, 200, 201
high-power diode lasers, 227231,
228230
InGaAsP diode lasers, 197
long-lived diode lasers, 206207
mirror damage in, 227
semiconductor diode lasers, 4,
107111, 199, 209, 210, 240241
diode-pumped neodymium-slab laser, 151
diodes, LEDs, 4, 26, 105, 133, 178, 199,
203, 271, 272, 318
Dirac, Paul, 9
direct-detection lidar, 178
DiscoVision, 138
dispersion-compensation bers (DCFs),
211
display technology, future trends in, 333
disposable contact lenses, 255
distributed Bragg reector lasers, 293
distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, 288,
293
Dixon, Richard W., 203, 205, 207, 207
DLDs (dark-line defects), 203
DNA
genetic modication, 311
microarrays, 312
Dobrowolski, George, 72
DOE (Department of Energy), 29, 164
Dollond, John, 13
dominant designs, 62, 63
Donders, F.G., 265
Doppler-free laser spectroscopy, 220
Dorpat Observatory, 14
dot-com boom, 283
double heterojunction lasers, 110, 111,
201, 201, 227, 228
Dover printer, 136, 137, 137
Dow Corning, 255
drop-on-demand inkjet, 62
DSP (digital signal processing), 211
duality of light, 12
Duguay, Michel, 238, 297
Dumke, William P., 107, 108, 108
Dupont, 24
Durafforg, G., 107
DVDs, 141, 141, 142
Dwight, Herb, 97, 98
dye lasers, 95, 304
dye sublimation printing, 50
dynamic grating spectroscopy, 219
dynamic light scattering, 312
dysprosium ions, 104
Dziedzic, Joe, 225
E-Tek Dynamics, 284

Ealey, Mark, 247
EAMs (electro-absorption modulators),
293
EARS (Electronic Array Raster Scanner),
136
Eastman, George, 10, 15, 25, 31, 33, 185
Eastman, Jay, 128
Eastman Dry Plate Co., 31
Eastman Kodak Co., 23, 25, 31, 36, 44,
51, 95, 161
Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory, 24,
25, 27, 3334, 185
Ebbers, Bernie, 286
ECBO (European Conferences on
Biomedical Optics), 313
ECCE (extracapsular lens extraction), 262
Eckhardt, Gisela, 115
344
Index
EDFA (erbium-doped ber amplier),

195198, 196198, 210, 230, 277,
280, 281, 288
Edison, Thomas, 4, 15, 23, 34, 185
Edln, Bengt, 18
Einstein, Albert, 3, 12, 81, 88
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 29, 49, 52, 64, 65,
85, 148, 157, 158, 185
EIT (electromagnetically induced
transparency), 217
Ektaprint 100 copier, 63
El-Sum, Hussein M.A., 119
electric power
laser fusion for, 171
solar power, 329, 332
electricity, 11
electro-absorption modulators (EAMs),
293
electromagnetic radiation, 11
electromagnetically induced transparency
(EIT), 217
electromagnetism, 11
electron microscope, 119, 204, 336
electron spin, 18
Electronic Array Raster Scanner (EARS),
136
electrophotography, 57
See also xerography
Electrophotography (Schaffert), 57
Electrotechnical Laboratories (Japan), 167
Ellerbrock, V.J., 267
ELT (Extremely Large Telescope), 248
emission lines, 12
Emmett, John, 161, 168
end-pumping, 196
endlessly single-mode (ESM) PCF, 299
endoscopy, 50, 55, 310
ber-optic endoscope, 50, 55, 56
energy, future trends in, 332
Energy Star 6, 272
engineering, post-World War II statistics,
85, 87
Enron, 284, 286
entangle-based quantum-key distribution,
320321
Epson, 270
Epstein, Ivan, 72
erbium, 280, 304
erbium-doped ber amplier (EDFA),
195198, 196198, 210, 230, 277,
280, 281, 288
erbium-doped lasers, 106
erbium ions, 104, 196
Ericksen, J.L., 269
Ernst Leitz Optical Works, 33, 34
ESM-PCF, 299
Essilor, 266
ether, 11
ether wind, 1112
Ettenberg, Michael, 199
European Center for Nuclear Research
(CERN), 279
European Conferences on Biomedical
Optics (ECBO), 313
europium ions, 104
Evans, R.M., 44
evaporated dielectric coatings, 70
excimer laser, 183
excimer laser ablation, 260, 306
excimer laser lithography, 4
excimer laser surgery, 257261, 258, 259,
306
excitation curves, 43
exclusion principle, 18
exobiology, 335
exoplanets, 252
extracapsular lens extraction (ECCE), 262
Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), 248
Exxon Nuclear, 161

Eye in the Sky: The Story of the CORONA
Spy Satellite (Day, Logsdon, &
Latell), 157
eye surgery. See ophthalmic surgery
eyeglasses, 10, 11, 1415, 265268, 267
astigmatism, 15
bifocals, 14, 184, 253, 254, 263, 265,
266, 268
frames for, 15
lenses, 184, 265, 266
for low-vision patients, 267
polarizing sunglasses, 51
F
Fabrikant, Valentin, 81
FabryPerot resonator, 81
Faint Object Camera (FOC), 250
Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS), 250
Fairchild K-19, 66
Fano interference, 217
Faraday, Michael, 11
Faris, Gregory, 277, 308
fast ignition target, 171
Faust, W.L., 92
Feinbloom, William, 253
Fejer, Martin, 213
FELs (free-electron lasers), 151, 336
femtosecond absorption spectroscopy, 180
femtosecond direct laser writing, 317318
femtosecond lasers, 147, 238, 239242,
241, 304, 305, 306
Fenner, G.E., 108, 109
Fergason, James, 270
fermions, 18, 322
FETs (eld effect transistors), 293
ber ampliers, 195196, 288
ber attenuation, 280
ber-based astronomy, 301
ber-grating compressors, 216
ber lasers, 241242
ber-optic communications, 4, 50,
209210, 210, 227, 230, 278281,
279, 281
ber-optic connectivity, 4
ber-optic endoscope, 50, 55, 56
ber-optic image scramblers, 55
ber-optic imaging, 5356
ber-to-the-home, 207
ber-optic amplier (FOA), 195198, 282
bers
Bragg bers, 297, 298
chalcogenide bers, 317
dispersion-compensation bers (DCFs),
211
ber structure, 301
glass bers, 5354, 55, 187, 195, 209,
210, 297, 328
high-power bers, 327
hollow-core photonic crystal bers,
297, 299, 300, 301, 327, 328
low-loss bers, 189193, 190193,
241, 278, 282
Mercedes ber, 301
microstructured optical bers, 277,
297301, 298301, 328
multi-core bers, 301, 328
non-zero dispersion-shifted bers, 280,
289
photonic bandgap bers, 277
photonic crystal ber (PCF), 298299,
299, 317, 327
rod-in-tube bers, 55, 190
single-mode bers, 5556, 191, 206,
210, 279, 301
ultra-low-loss bers, 327
berscope, 50
eld effect transistors (FETs), 293
lm-based photography, 10
lm, photographic. See photographic lm
Fiocco, Giorgio, 175, 176
FIREX project, 171
rst-generation lasers, 205
Fisher, A.G., 270
Fizeau interferometer, 144, 144
ame-emission spectroscopy, 20
ame hydrolysis, 190
ashlamp-pumped picosecond systems,
237239
ashlamp pumping, 84, 95, 95, 103, 169,
280
owing gas-dynamic carbon dioxide
lasers, 187
uorescence correlation spectroscopy, 312
uorescence microscope, 312
uorescence recovery after photobleaching
(FRAP), 311
uorescent lamp, 4, 271
uorite, 103
uorophores, 309, 311
FOA (ber-optic amplier), 195198, 282
FOC (Faint Object Camera), 250
folding Pocket Kodak (FPK) camera,
3233, 32
Ford Motor Co. Research Laboratory, 115
Ford Scientic Research Center, 177
Fork, Richard L., 216, 304
Forster, Don, 88
Frster resonance energy transfer (FRET),
311
Fort Belvoir, 72
FOS (Faint Object Spectrograph), 250
four-level lasers, 83, 104
four-wave mixing (FWM), 211, 219
Fowler, Alfred, 17
Foy, P.W., 111
FranckCondon principle, 232
Frank, F.C., 269
Franken, Peter, 114, 115, 213, 218, 219,
246
Frankford Arsenal, 70
FRAP (uorescence recovery after
photobleaching), 311
Fraunhofer, Joseph von, 12, 13
free-electron lasers (FELs), 151, 336
free-space solid-state lasers, 242
Fredericksz, V., 269
Freeman, R.R, 224
frequency combs, 4, 117, 147, 221, 300,
301, 337
frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG),
238
Fresnel, Augustin-Jean, 11, 12, 69
FRET (Frster resonance energy transfer),
311
Freulich, Rod, 180
FROG (frequency-resolved optical gating),
238
fuels, 332
Fuji-Xerox, 63
Fujimoto, James, 238, 240, 309, 310
Fujitsu Laboratories, 281
FULCRUM program, 154
fullerenes, 315
fused ber bundles, 55, 56
fusion research, with lasers, 166172,
167171
FWM (four-wave mixing), 211, 219
GaAlAs lasers, 197, 203, 240

GaAs-GaAlAs heterostructure
semiconductor lasers, 203, 204
GaAs homojunction (diode) lasers, 187
GaAs injection laser, 107109

Gabel, Conger, 96
Gabor, Dennis, 119, 122
GALEX space telescope, 252
GAMBIT system, 160
Gamble, Susan, 122
GaPAs, 109
Garbuzov, Dmitry Z., 111
Gardner, Chet, 178, 179
Garmire, Elsa, 116, 117
gas-dynamic lasers, 9293, 92, 150
gas lasers, 8893
ionized gas lasers, 9091, 91
GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, 165
Geffcken, Walter, 70
Gekko laser, 169
gelatin dry plates, 31
Gemini ampliers, 235, 235
gene chips, 311
gene expression, 311
General Electric Co. (GE), 2324, 70, 100,
108, 109, 165, 185, 187, 199
genetics
genetic modication, 311
optogenetics, 334
Geodolite Laser Distance Rangender, 98
99
Georgia Tech, 177
germania, 191
germanium, 107, 110, 199
Gerry, Ed, 150, 187
Geusic, J.E., 104, 105, 186
GHRS (Goddard High Resolution
Spectrograph), 250
Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), 248
Gilder, George, 284, 285
Giordmaine, Joe, 114, 116, 117, 186, 214
glass
7172, 73, 266
optical glass, 13, 23, 24, 33, 35, 101,
189, 266
photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass,
318
quality for lenses, 13, 14
rare-earth metal-doped glass ber, 210
glass bers, 5354, 55, 187, 195, 209, 210,
297, 328
glass fusion lasers, 169
glass lasers, 101, 104, 150, 166, 167, 168,
186, 237, 238, 239
glass mirrors, 68, 245
GMT (Giant Magellan Telescope), 248
Goddard, George, 64
Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph
(GHRS), 250
Godowsky, Leopold, Jr., 34
Goethe, J.W. von, 68, 69
Goetze, Richard, 17
Goldman, Jack, 62, 135
Goldmuntz, Lawrence, 82, 149
Goldsworthy, Michael, 165
Gordon, E.I., 91
Gordon, James, 7, 81, 82, 82, 215, 224
Goudsmit, Samuel, 18, 83
Gould, Gordon, 81, 82, 83, 100, 149, 150
governmental and industrial research
laboratories. See industrial and
governmental research laboratories
governmental funding agencies, 9,
185188
Graham, Clarence H., 40
Granit, Ragnar, 41
Granitsis, George, 101
Grant, Bill, 175
graphene, 315
graphite, 315
gravity-wave astronomy, 329
Gray, George, 270
Great Britain, 9
Great Observatories, 249, 252
green uorescent protein, 311
green gap, 271
Gregg, David P., 138
Grotrian, Walter, 1819
245248
group velocity dispersion (GVD), 215
Gschwendtner, Al, 177
GTE Laboratories, 117
Guggenheim, H.J., 105
Guiliano, Connie, 186
Guinand, Pierre Louis, 13
Guirao, Antonio, 263
Gustafson, Ken, 116
Gustavson, Todd, 10, 31
GVD (group velocity dispersion), 215
Hagan, David J., 277, 315

Hale, George Ellery, 244, 245, 245, 246
half-integral quantum numbers, 18
Hall, Charles, 153
Hall, Freeman, 178
Hall, Jan, 300
Hall, J.L., 219, 222
Hall, John, 97, 147
Hall, Robert N., 108, 109, 187
Haloid Co., 57, 60, 61
Hamburg Observatory, 4
Handbook of Physiological Optics
(Helmholtz), 15
handheld barcode scanners, 131132
Hnsch, Theodor, 94, 96, 147, 220, 220,
221, 224, 225, 300
Hansell, C.W., 53
Hardesty, Mike, 178, 180
Hardwick, David, 97
Hardy, A.C., 43, 44
Hardy, John, 247
Hardy spectrophotometer, 43
Harris, Stephen E., 186, 214, 216, 217,
221
Harrison, George, 20, 21, 28
Hartline, Haldan Keffer, 40, 40, 41
Hartman, R.L., 207, 207
HartmannSchack wavefront sensors, 256
Harvard College Observatory, 14, 14
Harvard great refractor, 14, 14
Harvard University, 101, 177, 186
Harvard University Optical Research
Laboratory, 65
Hasegawa, Akira, 117, 215
Hass, Georg, 72
Haus, H.A., 239
Haus, J., 213
Haussmann, Carl, 168
Hayashi, Izuo, 111, 201202, 204, 293
HBTs (hetero-junction bipolar transistors),
293
Heaps, Bill, 175, 177
Heard, H.G., 92
Heavens, Oliver, 72, 84
Hecht, Jeff, 9, 11, 51, 53, 79, 81, 85, 94,
100, 102, 114, 119, 149, 161, 277,
278, 282
Hecht, Selig, 3940, 40
Heilmeier, George, 269
Heinz, T., 221
Heisenberg, Werner, 18, 40
Helfrich, Wolfgang, 270
helium, model for neutral atom, 17
helium-mercury ion laser, 9091, 91
helium-neon lasers, 4, 84, 8889, 89, 90,
97, 98, 107, 120, 134, 135, 136,
138, 190
Hellwarth, Robert, 115
Index
345
Helmholtz, Hermann, 15
Henderson, Sammy, 178
Heraeus Corp., 155
Hercher, Michael, 116, 186
Herriott, Donald, 84, 88, 89, 89
Herschel, William, 11, 14
Herschel space telescope, 252
Herscher, Mike, 96
Hertz, Heinrich, 11, 12
hetero-junction bipolar transistors (HBTs),
293
heterodyne Doppler lidar, 177
heterodyne interferometry, 143, 247
Hewlett-Packard, 62, 63, 98, 131
Hexagon program, 79, 154, 158, 160
Hexagon spy satellite, 153156, 154156,
158
Heyerdahl, Thor, 98
Hicks, Will, 55, 56
hierarchical self-assembly, 318
high-average-power lasers, 336
228230
high-power ber lasers, 106, 126, 198
high-power bers, 327
high-power gas lasers, 4
High Speed Photometer (HSP), 250
Hilbert, Robert S., 157, 158, 159
Hillotype, 33
HIORP (Hubble Independent Optical
Review Panel), 250
HiPER project, 171
Hirschowitz, Basil I., 50, 55, 56
Hitachi Central Research Laboratory, 165,
227
Hochuli, Urs, 97
Hockham, G., 189, 209
hohlraum, 166, 170
Holland, Leslie, 72
hollow-core photonic crystal bers, 297,
299, 300, 301, 327, 328
holmium ions, 104
holographic interferometry, 144145
holography, 79, 119122
computer generated holograms
(CGHs), 145
phase-shifting interferometric, 145
reection holography, 121, 122
time-averaged holography, 145
two-wavelength holography, 145
Holonyak, N., Jr., 109, 187
Homos stereo camera, 34
Homer, Howard, 71
homodyne interferometry, 143144
Hooker, John K., 244
Hopkins, Harold H., 50, 54
Hopkins, Robert, 143, 158
HRL (Hughes Research Laboratory), 88,
91, 98, 100, 103, 115, 185, 186, 187
HSP (High Speed Photometer), 250
Hubble, Edwin, 244, 245, 247
Hubble Independent Optical Review Panel
(HIORP), 250
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), 4, 13, 143,
184, 247, 249250, 250, 251, 252
Huffaker, Milt, 178
Huggins, Margaret, 13
Huggins, William, 13
Hughes Aircraft Co., 94, 98, 100, 115
Hughes Research Laboratories (HRL), 88,
91, 98, 100, 103, 115, 185, 186, 187
Hull University, 270
Hund, Friedrich, 18
Hunter, Max, 151
Hunter, R.S., 44
Huygens, Christiaan, 11
Hycon, 67
Hycon K-38, 66
Hyde, Frank, 189
346
Index
hydrogen, Bohr model, 13

hydrogen-uoride chemical lasers, 93
hydrogen-uoride optical parametric
oscillator, 163
hyper-contrast optical systems, 252
hyperne splitting, 9, 20
hyperne structure, 19
IBM, 100, 108, 108, 110, 187, 199, 221

IBM Watson Research Center, 84, 94, 103,
104, 187, 187, 257
IBM Zurich Laboratories, 228
Icaroscope, 114
ICCE (intracapsular lens extraction), 262
ICG (indocyanine green), 309
ICLAS (International Coordination
Group on Laser Atmospheric
Studies), 178
illumination
uorescent lamp, 4, 271
incandescent light bulbs, 4, 24
solid-state lighting, 339
ILRC (International Laser Radar
Conference), 178, 179
image scramblers, 55
imaging barcode scanners, 133
imaging machines, xerography, 5763,
5861, 134137, 136, 137
Inaba, Humio, 180
incandescent bulbs, 4, 24
indium-tin-oxide (ITO) lm, 269
indocyanine green (ICG), 309
industrial and governmental research
laboratories, 9, 2330
Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS),
251252
infrared materials, 317
infrared optical microscope, 203204
infrared spectroscopy, 3
infrared thin lm, 72
inkjet printers, 50, 62, 63
inner-quantum number, 17
InP-based lasers, 206, 293, 294
Institute of Optics (University of
Rochester), 25, 33, 54, 134, 143,
158, 168, 169, 170, 185, 186, 304
instrumental optics, 9
integrated photonics, 277, 293295, 294,
295
Intel, 293
Intelligence Systems Panel (ISP), 65
intensity-comparison with standards
method, 20
intensity-modulation direct detection, 210
interference coatings, 6870
interference phenomena, 69
interferometers, 9, 12, 69, 70, 143146,
144, 247, 293, 322, 329
interferometric optical metrology,
143147
interferometry
heterodyne and homodyne interferometry, 143144, 247
metrology and, 143147
phase-shifting interferometry, 143, 144,
146147
stellar interferometers, 247
International Conference on Picosecond
Phenomena, 237
International Conference on Ultrafast
Phenomena, 237
International Coordination Group on
Laser Atmospheric Studies (ICLAS),
178
International Laser Radar Conference
(ILRC), 178, 179
International Quantum Electronics

Conference, 82, 162, 234
International Symposium on Remote
Sensing of Environment, 178
International Telecommunications Union,
193
Internet, 4, 63, 133, 142, 191, 193, 207,
211, 277, 279, 280, 282, 283, 285,
286, 287, 333
Internet of Things, 333
intracapsular lens extraction (ICCE), 262
intraocular lenses, 262264
iodoquinine sulfate, 51
ionized gas lasers, 9091, 91
ionography, 62
iPhone 6, 272, 272
Ippen, Erich P., 96, 216, 232, 239, 240
IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite),
251252
IRCOM (France), 297
Iskra laser system, 166
isosulfan blue, 309
isotope enrichment, 161165, 162164
ISP (Intelligence Systems Panel), 65
Itabe, Toshikazu, 179
ITEK and the CIA (Lewis), 157
ITEK Corp., 65, 143, 157, 158
ITEK Optical Systems, 247
Ito, Hiromasa, 179
ITO lm (indium-tin-oxide lm), 269
Ives, Herbert, 69
Izatt, Joe, 313
JahnTeller splitting, 234

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), 252
Janes, G. Sargent, 161
Janus laser, 168
Javan, Ali, 8283, 84, 88, 89, 89, 107
JDS Uniphase, 284
JDSU Corp., 230, 285
Jelalian, Al, 177
Jensen, Reed, 161
Jersey Nuclear-Avco Isotopes, 163
Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), 175
Jewett, Frank B., 27
JHPSSL (Joint High Power Solid State
Laser), 151, 151
JILA, 97, 221
Jobs, Steve, 140
Johnson, A.M., 216
Johnson, Kelly, 49, 65
Johnson, L.F., 104, 105, 232233
Johnson, Roy, 149
Johnson and Johnson, 255
Johnston, Sean, 122
Joint High Power Solid State Laser
(JHPSSL), 151, 151
Jones, Frank, 71
Journal of Applied Physics, 84
Journal of Display Technology, 271
Journal of Lightwave Technology,
291292
Journal of the Optical Society of America
(JOSA), 20, 38, 40, 41, 44, 56, 69,
119, 121, 221, 265, 312, 315
JPL (Jet Propulsion Lab), 175
Judd, D.B., 43
JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), 252
K-19 camera, 66
Kaiser, David, 86
Kaminskii, A.A., 105
Kantrowitz, Arthur, 150, 161
Kao, Charles, 189, 199, 209, 339
Kapany, Narinder, 54, 56, 100
Karrer, Paul, 41
Kass, Stanley, 176

Kay, Alan, 136
Kazarinov, R.F., 110
Keck, Donald B., 189, 190, 191, 279
Keck Ten-Meter-Diameter Telescope
Project, 248
Kelley, Paul, 3, 28, 49, 116, 179
Kepler mission, 252
Kepler space telescope, 252
Kerr-effect lensing, 236
Kerr-lens mode-locked lasers, 242, 304
Kerr nonlinearity, 211
Kessler Marketing Intelligence, 280
Ketterle, Wolfgang, 221, 225
Keuffel & Esser Co., 24
Keyes, R.J., 105, 108, 109, 187
KH-7 GAMBIT, 153
KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite, 153156,
154156, 158
Khokhlov, Rem V., 116
Kidder, Ray, 161, 166
Kiess, C.C, 20
Killinger, Dennis K., 175, 177, 178, 179,
180
Kimmerling, L.C., 107, 110
Kinetoscope, 34
King, Peter, 71
Kingslake, Rudolf, 33
Kingsley, Jack, 108, 109
Kirchhoff, Gustav Robert, 1213
Kirkpatrick, Paul, 119
Kirtland Air Force Base, 248
Kiss, Z.J., 104
Kitt Peak National Observatory,
245, 246
Kleinman, David, 117
KMS Fusion, 101, 168
Knight, Jonathan, 299, 300
Knoll, Henry, 253
Knox, Wayne H., 96, 277, 304, 305, 306
Knutson, J.W., Jr., 91
Kobayashi, Takao, 179
Kodachrome lm, 34
Kodak AG, 36
Kodak camera, 31
Kodak Co., 61, 158, 185
Kodak Research Laboratories. See
Eastman Kodak Research
Laboratory
Kodak Retina camera, 36
Koester, Charles, 101, 186, 195
Kollmorgen, Frederick, 69
Kompfner, Rudi, 223
Korad Inc., 100
Kornei, Otto, 59
Korolkov, Vladimir I., 111
Korsch, Dietrich, 250
Kossel, Walther, 17
Kowalski, Robert, 134, 135
Krag, W.E., 109
Kressel, Henry, 111, 199, 200
Krishnan, K.S., 19
Kroemer, Herb, 110, 187
Krupke, William, 103
krypton uoride lasers, 167
krypton-ion lasers, 91
Kubelka, P., 44
Kusch, Polykarp, 81
Labuda, E.F., 91
Lamb, Willis, 96, 114
Lamb shift, 220
Lamm, Heinrich, 50, 5354
Land, Edwin, 49, 5152, 64, 65, 158
Langmuir, Irving, 24
Lankard, Jack, 94
Large, Maryanne, 299
Large Optics Demonstration Experiment

(LODE), 151
large-scale photonic integrated chip
(LS-PIC), 293
Large Space Telescope (LST), 249
laser ablation, 92, 257, 258, 260, 306
laser-bars, 228
laser-based phase-shifting Fizeau
interferometer, 144, 144
laser-based spectroscopy, 147, 232
laser cooling, 221
laser diode pump, 304
laser diodes, 105, 199, 200, 201, 202, 293,
304, 318, 327
laser Doppler velocimetry, 328
Laser Focus (magazine), 121, 259
laser fusion experiments, 101
laser guide star, 4, 29, 178, 247, 248, 248
Laser Heterodyne Radiometer, 175, 177
The Laser in America (Bromberg), 103
laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK), 5,
183, 260, 261, 306, 308, 312
Laser In Space Technology Experiment
(LITE), 177
Laser Inc., 102
laser-induced-breakdown spectroscopy
(LIBS), 178
laser-induced continuum structure, 217
laser-induced uorescence (LIF), 177, 178
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave
Observatory (LIGO), 12
laser isotope enrichment, 161165, 162164
Laser Megajoule (LMJ) project, 170, 171
laser oscillation, 90, 91
laser printers, 134137, 136, 137,
183186
laser printing, 4, 62
laser radar, 175178
laser radiation pressure, 223
laser spectroscopy, 218219, 221222
laser trapping, 225
laser unequal path interferometer (LUPI),
143, 144
laser video disc, 138
laser weapons, 149152
lasers, 3, 4, 9, 50, 52, 79, 163, 209, 218
Airborne laser, 151
AlGaAs lasers, 202, 228
Alpha laser, 151
at American Optical Co., 10, 15, 51, 55,
56, 100, 101102
applications, 4
argon-ion lasers, 91, 91, 95, 96, 98,
196, 225, 234
Ashura laser system, 167
Asterix laser system, 166
carbon dioxide lasers, 9293, 92, 102,
124, 150, 163, 167, 168, 186, 187
chemical lasers, 93, 150, 151
chemical oxygen-iodine lasers (COILs),
151
chirp-pulse amplied femtosecond
lasers, 305
colliding pulse mode-locked lasers, 304
color-center lasers, 215, 241, 333
continuous wave argon-ion lasers, 98
continuous-wave (CW) dye lasers,
9596, 103, 161
continuous-wave femtosecond systems,
239242, 241
copper-vapor lasers, 96, 163, 240
copper-vapor pumped dye lasers, 163,
164
Cyclops laser, 168
Deln laser system, 167
Delta lasers, 168
development, 8184, 8893
105106
diode lasers. See diode lasers

diode-pumped neodymium-slab lasers,
151
distributed Bragg reector lasers, 293
distributed feedback (DFB) lasers, 288,
293
double heterojunction lasers, 110, 111,
201, 201, 227, 228
dye lasers, 95, 304
erbium-doped lasers, 106
excimer lasers, 183, 257261, 258, 259
femtosecond direct laser writing, 317
318
femtosecond lasers, 147, 238, 239242,
241, 304, 305, 306
ber lasers, 241242
ashlamp-pumped picosecond systems,
237239
owing gas-dynamic carbon dioxide
lasers, 187
four-level laser action, 83, 104
free-electron lasers (FELs), 151, 336
frequency comb lasers, 147
fusion research with, 166172
GaAlAs lasers, 197, 203, 240
GaAs-GaAlAs heterostructure semiconductor lasers, 203, 204
GaAs homojunction (diode)
lasers, 187
GaAs injection lasers, 107109
gas-dynamic lasers, 9293, 92, 150
gas lasers, 8893
Gekko lasers, 169
glass fusion lasers, 169
glass lasers, 101, 104, 150, 166, 167,
168, 186, 237, 238, 239
helium-mercury ion lasers, 9091, 91
helium-neon lasers, 4, 84, 8889, 89,
90, 97, 98, 107, 120, 134, 135, 136,
138, 190
high-average-power lasers, 336
228230
high-power ber lasers, 106, 126, 198
holography and, 120121
hydrogen-uoride chemical lasers, 93
industrial growth, 100
industrial lasers, 124126
InP-based lasers, 206, 293, 294
interferometric optical metrology,
143147
Iskra laser system, 166
for isotope enrichment, 161165,
162164
Joint High Power Solid State Laser
(JHPSSL), 151, 151
Kerr-lens mode-locked lasers, 242, 304
krypton uoride lasers, 167
krypton-ion lasers, 91
laser-based precision spectroscopy, 147
(LIBS), 178
laser isotope enrichment, 161165,
162164
Laser Megajoule (LMJ) project, 170, 171
laser unequal path interferometer
(LUPI), 143, 144
Ligne dIntgration Laser (LIL), 170
liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE), 200, 200,
203, 204, 206
live-cell lasers, 334
as manufacturing process tool, 124
materials processing with, 124126
matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI), 312
Index
347
medical applications. See medical

applications
mercury-ion lasers, 91, 98
Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical
Lasers (MIRACLs), 150, 150
million hour paper, 205
mirrors, 81, 88, 89, 90, 90, 91, 91, 94,
96, 97, 103, 130, 131, 132, 132,
143, 200, 202, 235, 336337
molecular gas lasers, 9293, 92
Navy ARPA Chemical Laser (NACL),
150
neodymium:ber lasers, 241
neodymium-glass ber lasers, 187
neodymium-glass lasers, 104, 150, 166,
167, 186, 237238
neodymium-glass rod lasers, 187
neodymium-YAG lasers, 104, 105, 124,
125, 186, 240, 242, 257, 258, 259,
301, 304
NIF lasers, 170, 171
Nike laser system, 167
noble-gas ion lasers, 91
nonlinear optics and, 114117
Nova lasers, 169, 170
Omega lasers, 169
Omega Upgrade lasers, 170, 171
Phebus lasers, 169
photolytically pumped iodine lasers, 166
picosecond lasers, 237239
printers, 134137, 136, 137
for propulsion, 336337
pulsed argon ion lasers, 91, 98
pulsed dye lasers, 96, 238239
pumped dye lasers, 95, 163, 164, 177,
234
Q-switching ruby lasers, 94, 115, 116,
116
quantum cascade lasers (QCLs), 176,
178, 318
quantum-well lasers, 202, 227, 228
radio-frequency coupling, 97
rare earth ber lasers, 4
remote sensing, laser radar, and lidar,
175178, 176, 177, 179, 180, 180
room-temperature GaAs-AlGaAs heterostructure semiconductor lasers,
203
ruby lasers, 83, 84, 88, 94, 95, 100,
103, 114, 115, 116, 116, 121, 124,
149, 175, 186, 218, 232, 234
semiconductor diode lasers, 4,
107111, 199, 209, 210, 240241
separate connement heterojunction
quantum well lasers, 202
Shiva lasers, 168
single-stripe lasers, 228, 229, 229, 231
solid-state lasers, 4, 84, 101, 103106,
125, 126, 131, 178, 227, 228, 231,
242, 316
soliton lasers, 241
at Spectra-Physics, 89, 90, 91, 9799
spectroscopy with, 96
stretched-pulse lasers, 242
stripe-geometry lasers, 111, 203
Sun-powered lasers, 101
in telescopes, 184, 245248, 251, 252
10-J Janus lasers, 168
three-section tunable DBR lasers, 293
titanium:sapphire lasers, 234, 235, 236,
242, 304
tunable dye lasers, 4, 9496, 95, 161
tunable quantum cascade lasers, 176
tunable solid state lasers, 105, 232236,
233235
types, 4
ultrafast-laser technology, 304306,
305, 306
ultrashort lasers, 306
348
Index
ultrashort-pulse lasers, 96, 237242,

239242
vibronic lasers, 233
vision correction. See vision correction
Vulcan lasers, 169
weapons, 149152
Yb:ber lasers, 242
ytterbium-doped lasers, 106
yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) lasers,
104, 105, 124, 125, 186, 225, 240,
242, 257, 258, 259, 301, 304
Zeta lasers, 168
Laservision, 138
Lasher, Gordon J., 108, 108
LASIK (laser in situ keratomileusis), 5,
183, 260, 261, 306, 308, 312
lasing without inversion (LWI), 217
Latell, B., 157
lateral inhibition, 40
Lawrence, George, 250
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
(LLNL), 96, 101, 161, 162, 163,
164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 228, 233
Lax, B., 109
LBO (lithium borate), 215
LCD TV, 272
LCDs (liquid crystal display), 269272,
271, 272, 318
LDs (semiconductor laser diodes), 105,
132
LDX (Long Distance Xerography), 134
Lebedev Institute (Russia), 167
Lechner, Bernard, 270
LED lighting, 4
LEDs (light-emitting diodes), 4, 26, 105,
133, 178, 199, 203, 271, 272, 318
Lee, Byoungho, 333
Leghorn, Richard, 65, 85
Lehmann, Otto, 269
Leica cameras, 3335, 35
Leith, Emmett, 119121, 120, 122
Leitz, Ernest, II, 35
LeMay, Curtis, 149
length-of-line method, 20
lens index, 266
lenses, 13
achromatic lens, 13
for cameras, 3, 33, 35
contact lenses, 183, 184, 253256, 254,
255, 260, 262, 333
eyeglasses, 184, 265, 266
lens index, 266
photochromic lenses, 267
prism lenses, 265
lensless photography, 121
Leonberger, Fred, 300
Leslie, F.M., 269
LEsperance, Francis L., 259, 260
Letokhov, V., 220, 224, 225
Lett, P., 221
Leviathan mirror, 14
Levishin, Vadim L., 114
Levison, Walter, 158
Levy, Richard, 161
Li, Guifang, 209
Li, Tingye, 211
LIBS (laser-induced-breakdown
spectroscopy), 178
Lick Telescope, 14
lidar, 175178
Lidar Pancake, 177
LIF (laser-induced uorescence), 177, 178
LIFE project, 171
light
coherent light, 79, 88, 98, 107, 108,
114, 119, 213, 214
as electromagnetic radiation, 11
illumination, 4, 24, 271, 339
inelastic scattering, 19
particle theory, 11
quantization, 3
as trigger for changes in cells, 312
wave nature, 1112
waveparticle duality, 12
wave theory, 11, 69
light-emitting diodes (LEDs), 4, 26, 105,
133, 178, 199, 203, 271,
272, 318
light guiding, 53, 54
light in ight, 238, 239
light waveguide, 201
lighting. See illumination
Ligne dIntgration Laser (LIL), 170
LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitationalwave Observatory), 12
Lincoln Laboratory. See MIT Lincoln
Laboratory
linear ion trap, 322
linear spectroscopy, 218219
Linkser, Ralph, 258
Linn, Doug, 100
Lippmann, Gabriel, 69
Lippmann emulsion, 69
liquid crystal display (LCD), 269272,
271, 272, 318
liquid-phase epitaxy (LPE), 200, 200, 203,
204, 206
Lister, Joseph (son; surgeon), 14
Lister, Joseph Jackson (father), 14
LITE (Laser In Space Technology
Experiment), 177
lithium borate (LBO), 215
lithography, 4, 50, 318
live-cell lasers, 334
LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory), 96, 101, 161, 162, 163,
164, 165, 166, 169, 170,
228, 233
LMJ project (Laser Megajoule project),
170, 171
local realism, 320
Lockhart, Luther, 71
Lockheed, 65
Lockheed CL-282 (aircraft), 65
Lockheed Sunnyvale, 249
Lockwood, H.F., 202
LODE (Large Optics Demonstration
Experiment), 151
Logsdon, J.M., 157
Lohmann, Adolf, 145
Lomb, Adolph, 25
Lomb, Henry, 15
long-distance telephone, 26
Long Distance Xerography
(LDX), 134
Los Alamos Laboratory, 161162, 163
low-loss bers, 189193, 190193, 241,
278, 282
low-vision patients, 267
LPE (liquid-phase epitaxy), 200, 200, 203,
204, 206
LS coupling, 18
LS-PIC (large-scale photonic integrated
chip), 293
LST (Large Space Telescope), 249
Lubin, Moshe, 168
Lucent Technologies, 283285
Lumire brothers, 34
Luna-See project, 175, 176
Lundegrdh, Henrik, 20
Luo, Fang-Chen, 270
LUPI (laser unequal path interferometer),
143, 144
LWI (lasing without inversion), 217
Lyman, John, 161
Lyman, Theodore, 17
Lyon, Dean, 71
MacAdam, David, 20, 44

MacAdam ellipses, 44
Macenka, Steve, 252
Macleod, Angus, 68
Madden, Frank, 158
magnesium uoride, for anti-reective
coatings, 7071
magnetism, 11
magneto-optic (M-O) recording, 140
magneto-optical trap (MOT), 220221,
225
Magnuson, Warren, 29
Maguire, Mike, 153, 154, 156
Mahler, Joseph, 51
Maiman, Theodore, 52, 73, 79, 8384, 84,
100, 103, 104, 107, 119, 149, 186,
189, 213, 215, 218
Maitenaz, 266
Maker, P., 219
MALDI (matrix-assisted laser desorption/
ionization), 312
Malus, Etienne-Louis, 11
Manenkov, A.B., 297
Mangus, John, 250
Manhattan Project, 29
Mannes, Leopold, 34
Martinot-Lagarde, P., 90
Marzocco, B., 262
masers, 50, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 103, 107,
209, 233
Massoulie, M.J., 107
master-oscillator power amplier
(MOPA), 163, 198
Mather, John, 252
Mathias, L.E.S., 92
matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization
(MALDI), 312
matrix TFT-LCD, 270
Mauna Kea telescope, 4
Maurer, Robert, 189190, 191
Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics,
95, 166, 300
Maxwell, James Clerk, 11, 33
Mayburg, Sumner, 107
Mayer, Herbert, 72
Mayne-Banton, Veronica, 257
MCA, 138
McCone, John, 153
McCormick, Pat, 176177, 179
McDermid, Stuart, 175
McFarland, Bill, 95
McFarlane, R.A., 92
MCI Communications, 278
MCI Worldcom, 285, 286
MCVD (modied chemical vapor
deposition), 297
McWhorter, A.L., 109
medical applications, 306
309312, 334335
excimer laser surgery, 257261, 258,
259, 306
imaging, 50, 309, 328
LASIK technique, 5, 183, 260, 261,
306, 308, 312
medical instruments, 55, 91
photodynamic therapy, 183184, 309,
312, 334
photorefractive keratectomy (PRK),
260, 261
radial keratotomy (RK), 259260
medical imaging, 50, 309, 328
medical optics, 4
Mees, C.E.K., 25, 26, 33, 34, 244
Meggers, William F., 17, 18, 20, 20, 21
Mehr and Mahler, 14

Meinel, Aden, 245, 246, 247, 250
Meinel, Marjorie, 250
Melekhin, V.N., 297
Mellon Institute (University of Pittsburgh),
71
MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical
systems), 310
Menyuk, Norman, 179
Menzies, Bob, 175, 177
Mercedes ber, 301
Mercer, G.N., 91
mercury-ion laser, 91, 98
metal nanoparticles, 311
metallic mirrors, 68, 6972
metamaterials, 316, 316
Metcalf, H., 220, 224
metrology, interferometric, 143147
Meyerhof, Otto, 41
Michelson, Albert, 9, 12, 19, 144, 244,
246
Michelson interferometer, 12, 247, 329
MichelsonMorley experiment, 12, 12,
329
micro-electro-mechanical systems
(MEMS), 310
microbots, 328
microuidics, 301, 311, 318
micromachining, 306
micrometer-scale optoelectronic
microbots, 328
microscopes, 3, 14, 15, 34, 35, 53, 237,
301, 309313, 323
atomic force microscopy (AFM),
225226
coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) microscopy, 308
dark-eld microscope, 312
digital holographic microscopy, 311
electron microscope, 119, 204, 336
uorescence microscope, 312
infrared optical microscope, 203204
multi-mode ber microscope, 328
multi-photon microscope, 305
nonlinear microscope, 308
optical microscopes, 14, 257
phase-shifting interference microscope,
144, 145
photoacoustic microscope, 310
photoactivated localization microscopy
(PALM), 311
stochastic optical reconstruction
microscopy (STORM), 311
two-photon microscopes, 305
microstructured optical bers, 277,
297301, 298301, 328
microwave masers, 81, 83
Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser
(MIRACL), 150, 150
military laboratories, 186
military optics, 49, 55, 64, 79
anti-reection coatings, 69
ber-optic image scramblers, 55
fused ber bundles, 55, 56
laser weapons, 149152
imaging
Millennium Project, 193
Miller, David A.B., 304
Miller, R.C., 91, 116, 186, 214
Miller, S., 293
Miller, W.C., 70
Millikan, Robert A., 18
million hour paper, 205
miniaturization, 310
Minogen, V.G., 224
MIRACL (Mid-Infrared Advanced
Chemical Laser), 150, 150
Miroex reex camera, 35
mirrors, 151, 155

astronomy, 69, 245, 247, 251, 252
coatings, 68, 69, 245, 329
early history, 68
glass mirrors, 68, 245
lasers, 81, 88, 89, 90, 90, 91, 91, 94, 96,
97, 103, 130, 131, 132, 132, 143,
200, 202, 235, 336337
Leviathan mirror, 14
metallic mirrors, 68, 6972
in telescopes, 245
MIT, 86, 96, 116, 175, 186, 206, 220,
240, 241, 242
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, 109, 116, 175,
177, 185, 186, 187, 199, 206,
233, 304
MIT Ultrafast Optics Lab, 240
MIT Wavelength Tables (Harrison), 21
MLIS program, 164
M-O (magneto-optic) recording, 140
mobile display, 272
mode locking, 147, 186, 237, 238, 239
mode patterns, 55
Model A camera, 35
modems, 279, 282
modied chemical vapor deposition
(MCVD), 297
molecular gas lasers, 9293, 92
molecular imaging, 308
molecular laser isotope enrichment, 165
molecular physics, 3
molecular ruler, 311
molecular spectroscopy, 1920
Mollenauer, Linn F., 214, 215, 241
Mooney, Robert, 71
Mooradian, Aram, 178
Moore, Duncan, 250
MOPA (master-oscillator power
amplier), 163, 198
Morley, Edward, 12
Mosaic Fabrications, 56
Moscow State University, 116
Moss, Steven C., 277, 315
MOT (magneto-optical trap), 220221,
225
motion picture lm, 15
motion pictures, 34
Moulton, Peter F., 105, 232, 233, 234, 304
Mourou, Gerard, 235, 242, 304
movies, 51, 52, 72, 138
Mt. Palomar observatory, 4, 18, 244, 245
Mt. Wilson observatory, 18, 244, 247
multi-core bers, 301, 328
multi-layer dichroic reector, 202
multi-megapixel arrays, 329
multi-mode ber microscope, 328
multi-photon microscope, 305
Multi Speed Shutter Co., 34
Multi-University Research Initiatives
(MURIs), 188
multifocal contact lenses, 254, 255
multiplets, 17
Multiplex, 122
Munk, F., 44
Munsell Value scale, 43
Murray, Ed, 175
Murray, John, 166
Myers, Mark B., 57
MZ modulator (MZM), 295
Mller Hansen, Holger, 54
NACL (Navy ARPA Chemical Laser), 150

Nagarajan, Radha, 277, 293
Nagel, August, 36
Nagel Werke, 36
nanocarbon, 315
nanocones, 315
Index
349
nanodiamond, 315
nanofabrication, 5
nanoparticles, 309, 312, 316
metal nanoparticles, 311
plasmonic nanoparticles, 315
quantum dots, 312, 315316
semiconductor nanoparticles, 312
nanoplasmonic materials, 316
nanoporation, 312
nanoscale memory, 329
nanoscopic metal particles, 316
nanostructuring, 315
nanosurgery, 312
nanotubes, 315
narrowband interference lters, 70
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space
Administration), 29, 175, 176, 177,
249, 250, 252
NASA Goddard, 175, 177
NASA Langley, 175, 176
Nasledov, D.N., 108
Nassau, K., 104
NASTRAN program, 154
Nathan, Marshall I., 107, 108, 108, 110
National Academy of Sciences, 261
National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA), 29, 175,
176, 177, 249, 250, 252
National Bureau of Standards (NBS), 20,
24, 25, 26, 27, 43, 185
National Defense Research Committee
(NDRC), 27, 28, 49
National Ignition Facility, 170, 170, 171
National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), 26, 177, 221,
225, 226, 300
National Reconnaissance Ofce
(NRO), 64
National Science Foundation (NSF),
29, 245
Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), 71,
167, 185, 298
Navy ARPA Chemical Laser (NACL), 150
NCR, 129
NDRC (National Defense Research
Committee), 27, 28, 49
near-infrared optical probes, 329
nebulium, 18
negative-index metamaterials, 316
Nelson, Herb, 111, 200
Nelson, Jerry, 248
neodymium-doped calcium tungstate, 104
neodymium-doped glass ber, 195
neodymium-doped optical amplier, 280
neodymium-ber lasers, 241
neodymium-glass ber lasers, 187
neodymium-glass lasers, 104, 150, 166,
167, 186, 237238
neodymium-glass rod, 101
neodymium-glass rod lasers, 187
neodymium ion, 104
neodymium-YAG lasers, 104, 105, 124,
125, 186, 240, 242, 257, 258, 259,
301, 304
neon sign, 9
Neugebauer, Gerry, 252
New, G.H.C., 213, 239
New Ideas Manufacturing, 34
Newhall, S.M., 44
Newton, Isaac, 68
NeXT, 140
Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST),
252
Ng, Won, 115
NGC 6543, 18
NGST (Next Generation Space Telescope),
252
NICMOS system, 250
NIF laser, 170, 171
350
Index
Nike laser system, 167

Nimitz, Chester, Jr., 153
NIST (National Institute of Standards and
Technology), 26, 177, 221, 225,
226, 300
nitrogen lasers, 92
Nixon, Richard M., 153
nLight Inc., 230
noble-gas ion lasers, 91
noble metals, 312, 316
Nomura, Akio, 179
non-zero dispersion-shifted bers, 280,
289
nondestructive testing, holographic, 45
nonlinear frequency conversion, 4
nonlinear microscope, 308
Nonlinear Optical Properties of
Materials, 215
nonlinear optics, 114117, 183, 213217,
219220, 238
applied, 213217, 214217
lasers and, 114117
parametric nonlinear optics, 218
Nonlinear Optics (Bloembergen), 116
nonlinear phenomena, 4
nonlinear refraction, 215
nonlinear spectroscopy, 215, 219221
Nordberg, Martin, 189, 190
Norrby, Sverker, 263
Nortel, 284, 286
Northrop Grumman, 151
Northwestern University, 186
Nova laser, 169, 170
NRL (Naval Research Laboratory), 71,
167, 185, 298
NRO (National Reconnaissance Ofce),
64
NSF (National Science Foundation), 29,
245
NTT, 197
nuclear structure, optical spectroscopy, 19
nuclear technology
fusion research with lasers, 166172,
167171
laser isotope enrichment, 161165,
162164
Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 164
null correctors, 143
Nutting, Perley G., 9, 25, 25, 27, 33,
38, 39
O-Series Leica camera, 35, 35

OAO (Orbiting Astronomical
Observatory), 247, 249
OBrien, Brian, 24, 54, 55, 114
OCT (optical coherence tomography), 5,
309
octave frequency combs, 4
Odlyzko, Andrew, 283
OEICs (opto-electronic integrated
circuits), 293
OFCC (Optical Fiber Communications
Conference), 211, 283284, 283,
284, 286, 289, 291
Ofce of Naval Research (ONR), 29, 82,
185
Ofce of Scientic Research and
Development (OSRD), 27
Offner, Abe, 143
OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes),
318
Omega laser, 169
Omega Upgrade laser, 170, 171
Omnifocal lenses, 266
Omniguide, 298
onoff keying (OOK), 294
On the mechanism of the eye
(Young), 14
ONR (Ofce of Naval Research), 29, 82,

185
OOK (onoff keying), 294
Operation Paperclip, 72
ophthalmic surgery, 306
309312, 334335
cataract surgery, 124, 184, 262264,
312
259, 306
306, 308, 312
260, 261
ophthalmoscope, 15
OPNs (optical polymer nanocomposites),
316
OPO (optical parametric oscillator), 214
Optech Corp., 177
optical astronomy, 184, 247, 248, 249,
252
optical bistability, 215
optical ceramics, 316
optical clock transitions, 220
Optical Coating Laboratory Inc., 284
optical coatings, 3, 6873, 142
anti-reection coatings, 3, 69, 70
Blu-Ray, 142
computer-aided design, 73
early history, 68
optical coherence tomography (OCT), 5,
309
optical communications, 183, 186, 189,
193, 195, 199, 205, 209211, 215,
237, 277, 289292, 289, 290, 338
optical diagnostics, 334
optical discs
history, 138142, 141, 142
writable and re-writable discs, 139140
optical exobiology, 335
Optical Fiber Communications
Conference (OFCC), 211, 283284,
283, 284, 286, 289, 291
optical glass, 13, 23, 24, 33, 35, 101, 189,
266
optical imaging, in vivo, 308310
optical instruments, 1315, 23
optical interferometers, 143
optical Kerr effect, 215
optical levitation, 223
optical masers, 81
optical materials, 315318, 316, 317
Optical Materials Express (journal), 315
optical microscopes, 14, 257
optical modulation spectroscopy, 219
optical molasses, 220, 225
optical networks, 338
optical parametric generation, 214
optical parametric oscillator (OPO), 214
optical phase conjunction, 215
optical pick-up (OPU), 138
optical polymer nanocomposites (OPNs),
316
optical pumping, 81
Optical Research Associates, 157
The Optical Society (OSA), 17, 19, 20, 25,
27, 33, 38, 40, 57, 70, 84, 120,
178, 213, 219, 222, 237, 246,
291, 304
areas of interest, 3
biomedical optics and, 312313
color science, 4344
Committee on Colorimetry, 43
Committee on Needs in Optics, 86

membership, 3
The Science of Color, 43
Uniform Color Scales, 43
optical solitons, 4, 25
optical spectroscopy, 3, 17, 19, 21, 24, 50,
175, 218, 220, 335
optical surveillance. See spy satellites;
optical trapping, 223226, 224, 311, 313
optical tweezers, 222, 225, 226, 301, 311,
327
optics, 277, 284
adaptive optics, 29, 151, 178, 184, 247,
248, 248, 329
309312, 334335
industrial and governmental research
laboratories, 9, 2330
microuidics and, 301, 311, 318
military optics, 49, 55, 56, 64, 69, 79,
149152
nonlinear optics, 114117, 183,
213217, 219220, 238
physiological optics, 14, 15
quantum optics, 4, 9, 166, 222, 300,
321, 331
R&D funding, 9, 185188
optics (history), 35
pre-1800, 11
pre-1940, 34, 944
19411959, 4973, 8587
19601974, 79180
1970s status, 8587
19751990, 183236
1991present, 277323
Optics Express (journal), 312, 313
Optics in the Life Sciences (meeting), 313
Optics Letters (journal), 299, 312
Optics Technology, 100
opticution, 225
Optiks (Newton), 11
opto-electronic integrated circuits
(OEICs), 293
Optoelectronics Research Center (ORC),
299
optogenetics, 334
optometer, 14
Orange Book (optical discs), 140
Orbiting Astronomical Observatory
(OAO), 247, 249
ORC (Optoelectronics Research Center),
299
organic/inorganic composite LEDs, 318
organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs),
318
organic photoreceptors, 63
Osaka University, 169
Oseen, C.W., 269
OSRD (Ofce of Scientic Research and
Development), 27
Ostermayer, F.W., 105
Overage, Carl, 64
Oxford University, 114
oxide semiconductors, 270
Ozanics, V., 253
Paanenen, Roy, 187

Paisner, Jeffery A., 162
Pake, George, 62
PALM (photoactivated localization
microscopy), 311
Palmer, Roger C., 133
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), 135,
136
Panish, M.B., 111, 200, 201202, 293

Pankove, J.I., 107
Pappis, Jim, 187
parametric nonlinear optics, 218
parametric oscillators, 186
parametric processes, 4
Parker, J.T., 92
Parks, Bob, 250
Parsons, William, 14
particle theory of light, 11
particle tracking, 312
Paschen, Friedrich, 17
passive optical network (PON), 291
Patel, C.K.N., 92, 150, 186
Pauli, Wolfgang, 18, 1920, 206
Payne, David, 196, 197, 210, 280
PBG (photonic bandgap), 297, 298
PCF (photonic crystal ber), 298299,
299, 317, 327
Pease, F.G., 246
Pepys, Samuel, 265
Perilli, 283
periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN),
213
periscope, 53
Perkin, Richard, 64, 66
Perkin-Elmer Corp., 50, 66, 90, 143, 153,
155, 185, 249
Pershan, Peter, 115
personal computers, 135, 141, 279, 282,
331
Peters, C. Wilbur Pete, 50, 55, 114
Peterson, Otis, 95, 161
petroleum industry, 332
Pfund, August Hermann, 70
PHASAR routers, 293
phase change recording, 140
phase-shift keying (PSK), 210, 291,
294295, 295
phase-shifting interference microscope,
144, 145
phase-shifting interferometric holography,
145
phase-shifting interferometry, 143, 144,
146147
phased array routers, 293
Philips, 138, 139, 140
Philips Audio Division, 138
Philips Research Laboratories, 138
Phillips, W., 220, 221, 224, 225
Phebus laser, 169
photo-nishing industry, 31
photo-thermo-refractive (PTR) glass, 318
photoablation, 261
photoacoustic imaging, 309
photoacoustic microscope, 310
photoactivated localization microscopy
(PALM), 311
photoactive pigment electrography, 62
photobiostimulation, 334
photocathode materials, 3
photochromic lenses, 267
photocopiers, 50
photodynamic therapy, 183184, 309,
312, 334
photoelectric effect, 3, 12
photographic emulsions, 31
photographic lm, 10, 15, 34, 39, 51, 52
photographic lters, 51
photography, 3, 10, 15
in the 1800s, 31
cellulose nitrate, 15
color lm, 34, 52
color photography, 3, 10, 33, 34
dry plates, 15
lm, 10, 15, 34, 39, 51, 52
instant photography, 51
Kinetoscope, 34
lensless photography, 121
motion pictures, 15, 34

movies, 51, 52, 72, 138
Polaroid process, 49, 52, 158, 186
speckle photography, 145
three-dimensional movies, 51
See also cameras; spy satellites
Photography by laser (Scientic
American), 121
photolithography, 4, 50, 312
photolytically pumped iodine laser, 166
photometry, 43
photomodication of cells, 312
photomultiplier tubes, 3
photomultipliers, 26, 245
photonic bandgap (PBG), 297, 298
photonic bandgap bers, 277
photonic crystal ber (PCF), 298299,
299, 317, 327
photonic integrated circuit (PIC), 293, 338
photonic lanterns, 301
photonic materials, 315
photoreceptors, 40, 63, 134, 135
photoreconnaissance. See spy satellites;
photorefractive keratectomy (PRK), 260,
261
phototypesetting, 50
Physical Review Letters (journal), 82, 83,
114, 115, 223, 225
physicists, post-World War II statistics, 85,
86
physiological optics, 14, 15
PIC (photonic integrated circuit), 293, 338
picosecond lasers, 237239
pillars of formation (star formation),
250251, 251
piplin, 213
Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical
Chemistry and Applied
Spectroscopy, 50
Pittsburgh Plate Glass, 24
Planck, Max, 12
Planck space telescope, 252
plasmonic nanoparticles, 315
plastic sheet polarizer, 51
plutonium, laser isotope enrichment,
163164
PMD (polarization-mode dispersion), 211
Pocket Kodak camera, 32
Pohl, R., 68
Polacolor, 49
Polanyi, Tom, 102
polarization, 11, 5152, 143, 146, 169,
197, 210, 211, 241242, 291, 294,
295
polarization-based stereoscopy, 51
polarization-mode dispersion (PMD), 211
polarized reection, 11
polarized windshields, 51
polarizing sheets, 51
polarizing sunglasses, 51
Polaroid Corp., 51, 65, 122, 158, 280
Polaroid process, 49, 52, 136, 158
Polaroid SX70 camera, 64
Polavision instant movies, 52
Pollard, Marvin, 55
polycarbonate, 266
PON (passive optical network), 291
Popov, Yu. M., 107
Porro prisms, 14
Porter, J., 256
Portnoi, E.L., 111
Porto, S., 218
Post Ofce Research Laboratories (UK),
298
potassium dihydrogen phosphate, 114,
116
PPLN (periodically poled lithium niobate),
213
Index
351
praseodymium ions, 104

Preserving the Miracle of Sight: Lasers
and Eye Surgery (National
Academy of Sciences), 261
Pressel, Phil, 79, 160
Pressley, R.J., 104
Priest, I.G., 43
Princeton University, 249
Pringsheim, P., 69
printers
inkjet printers, 50
laser printers, 134137, 136, 137
printing technology, 50
prism lenses, 265
prisms, 12, 14, 21, 89, 120, 216, 233, 240,
241, 265, 266, 267
Pritchard, David, 96, 220
PRK (photorefractive keratectomy), 260,
261
Problems in Nonlinear Optics (Khokhlov
and Akhmanov), 116
Project 3 committee, 65
Project Blackeye, 150
Prokhorov, Alexander, 218
PSK (phase-shift keying), 210, 291,
294295, 295
PTR glass (photo-thermo-refractive glass),
318
Pulkovo Observatory, 14
pulse compression, 216, 216
pulsed argon ion laser, 91, 98
pulsed dye lasers, 96, 238239
pumped dye lasers, 95, 163, 164, 177, 234
pumping (lasers), 4
Purcell, Edward, 64
Purdue University, 186
Q-switching ruby lasers, 94, 115, 116, 116

QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation),
291
QCLs (quantum cascade lasers), 176, 178,
318
QD LEDS (quantum-dot LEDs), 272
QIS (quantum information science),
320323, 321, 322
QPM (quasi-phase-matching) technique,
213
quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM),
291
quadrature phase-shifted keying (QPSK),
291, 294
quadropole trap, 220
Quantatron, 100
quantization of light, 3
quantum algorithms, 321, 322
quantum cascade lasers (QCLs), 176, 178,
318
quantum communications, 323
quantum computers, 320323, 329
quantum-conned semiconductors, 178,
315316
quantum-dot (QD) LEDs, 272
quantum dots, 308, 312, 315316, 322
Quantum Electronics Conference (High
View, NY), 82
quantum error correction, 321, 321
quantum information, 222
quantum information science (QIS),
320323, 321, 322
quantum-key distribution, 320
quantum mechanics, 3, 9, 1718, 232,
320323, 331
quantum optical sensitivity, 331
quantum optics, 4, 9, 166, 222, 300, 321,
331
quantum simulators, 329
quantum theory, 3, 9, 13, 17, 18, 21
352
Index
quantum-well infrared photodetectors

(QWIPs), 316
quantum-well lasers, 202, 227, 228
quantum-well materials, 316
quantum wells, 228, 304, 315, 316
quantum wires, 316
quasi-phase-matching (QPM) technique,
213
qubit, 321, 321, 322, 322
Quist, T.M., 105, 108, 109, 187
QWIPs (quantum-well infrared
photodetectors), 316

radiation pressure, 223
radio communication, 26
Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 26,
53, 129, 269, 270
radio technology, World War I, 2526
radioastronomy, 50
Radioptics, 161
Raman, Chandrasekhara Venkata, 19, 19
Raman effect, 19
Raman frequency combs, 301
Raman spectroscopy, 19, 218, 219, 308,
310
Ramsey, Norman, 220
Rand, S.C., 28
rare earth ber lasers, 4
rare earth ions, 104
rare-earth metal-doped glass ber, 210
rare gas-halide excimers, 92
ray guns, 149
Rayleigh, Lord, 12
Raytheon, 100, 178, 185, 187
RCA (Radio Corporation of America), 26,
53, 129, 269, 270
RCA Laboratories, 185, 199, 201, 227
re-writable discs, 139140
Reagan, John, 176
reconnaissance cameras, 6467
imaging
reconnaissance satellites
157160, 159
154156, 158
Sputnik, 52, 73, 79, 85, 157, 185
recording spectrophotometer, 43
rectier lens, 159
Red Book (optical discs), 138139
Rediker, R.H., 109, 206
Reeves, Will, 300
reection holography, 121, 122
refractometer, 35
refractors, 14
Reinberg, A.R., 105
Reinitzer, Friedrich, 269
Reintjes, J., 216
remote sensing, 175178
Rempel, Bob, 89, 99
Renhorn, Ingmar, 178
Research Institute of Experimental Physics
(Russia), 166
residual spectrum method, 20
resonance radiation pressure, 223
resonant Raman spectroscopy, 218
ReSTOR lens, 263
retina, 40, 41
retinal, 41
retinene, 41
ReZoom lens, 264
Rhees, Benjamin Rush, 33
rhodopsin, 39, 41
Richard, Jules, 34
Richards, A. Newton, 27
Rider, Ron, 136

Ridley, Sir Harold, 262, 263
Rigden, J. Dane, 88, 89, 89, 90
Rigrod, W.W., 89
RIT method, 190, 190
Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrain wide-eld
design, 4
Ritchey, George, 244
Riverside Research Institute, 86
RK (radial keratotomy), 259260
Robinson, C. Paul, 162
Rochester Optical Society, 25
Rockefeller, David, 157158
Rockefeller family, 85
Rockefeller Foundation, 244, 245
rod-in-tube bers, 55, 190
Rohlsberger, R., 222
Roman, Nancy, 249
room-temperature GaAs-AlGaAs
heterostructure semiconductor
lasers, 203
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 27, 28, 185
Rosenberg, R., 96
Ross, M., 105
Rossell, Henry Norris, 18
Rothe, Karl, 175
Rouard, Pierre, 70, 72
Royal Observatory (Greenwich), 26
rubber manufacturing, 50
ruby lasers, 83, 84, 88, 94, 95, 100, 103,
114, 115, 116, 116, 121, 124, 149,
175, 186, 218, 232, 234
ruby masers, 83
Ruddock, Ken, 98, 99
Rudolph, Paul, 35
Rudolph Instruments, 305
Runge, Peter, 96
Rupprecht, Hans, 110
Russell, Henry Norris, 18
Russell, James, 138
Russell, Phillip, 179, 277, 297, 300, 300,
327
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK),
169, 235, 235
Rutz, R.F., 109
Ryan, John, 286
Rydberg, Johannes, 13
Rydberg constant, 220
Rydberg formula, 17
Saint-Ren, Henry C., 53

samarium-doped calcium uoride, 104
samarium ions, 104
Sarles, L.R., 104
Sasano, Yasuhiro, 179
satellites. See spy satellites; surveillance
imaging
Saunders, Frederick A., 18
Saunderson, J.L., 44
scanners, for barcodes. See barcode
scanners
Schadt, Martin, 270
Schaefer, Fritz, 95
Schaffert, Roland, 57
Schawlow, Arthur, 50, 8183, 92, 96, 98,
103, 104, 107, 149, 209, 220, 221,
222, 224, 225
Schindler, Rudolf, 53
Schmidt, Bernard, 244
Schmidt camera, 4, 244, 245
Schotland, Richard, 175
Schott, Otto, 9, 14, 23, 35
Schott and Sons, 14, 15, 70
Schott Glass, 248
Schrdinger, Erwin, 9, 18
Schroeder, Harold, 72
Schuda, Felix, 96
Schulte, Dan, 250

Schultz, Peter, 190, 191
Schwartz Electro-Optics, 234
The Science of Color (Optical Society of
America), 43
Scifres, Carol, 229
Scifres, Donald R., 229, 229, 285
Scott, Rod, 66
SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), 151
second-generation lasers, 205
second harmonic generation (SHG), 4, 117,
213, 214, 218, 221, 238, 316, 318
second order nonlinear interactions, 215
secret keys, 323
segmented telescope, 3
Seiko, 270
self-developing lm, 51
self-phase modulation (SPM), 117, 215
self-trapping, 117
semiconductor circuits, 50
semiconductor diode lasers, 4, 107111,
199, 209, 210, 240241
semiconductor laser diodes (LDs), 105
semiconductor lasers, million hour
paper, 205
semiconductor nanoparticles, 312
sensing particles, 327328
sensor systems, 327328
separate connement heterojunction
quantum well lasers, 202
SERS (surface-enhanced Raman
scattering), 316
Shack, R.V., 246
Shank, Charles V., 96, 216, 239, 241, 304
Shannon, Claude E., 189
Shannon, R.R., 246, 250
Shannon limit, 209
Shapiro, S.L., 117, 238
Shaver, William, 189
She, C.Y., 178
Shen, Y.R., 221
Shenstone, Allen G., 21
SHG (second harmonic generation), 4, 117,
213, 214, 218, 221, 238, 316, 318
Shimizu, Fujio, 116
Shimizu, M., 197
Shiner, Bill, 101102
Shiva laser, 168
Shlaer, Simon, 39
Shor, Peter, 321
short-wave radio, 26
Sibbett, Wilson, 242, 304
Sieder, Irwin, 104
Siegel, Keeve M., 168
Siegman, Anthony, 105
SILEX process, 165
Silex Systems Ltd., 165
silicon-on-insulator (SOI) modulator, 294
silicon photonics, 242, 293, 294
silicon TFTs, 270
Simplex camera, 34
Simpson, W.M., 217
SINDA program, 154
single-mode bers, 5556, 191, 206, 210,
279, 301
single molecular detection, 311
single-photon systems, 338
single-stripe lasers, 228, 229, 229, 231
SIRTF (Space Infrared Telescope Facility),
249
Skunk Works, 65
Slepian, Joseph, 24
Smakula, Alexander, 69, 70, 72
Small Business Innovative Research
Program, 187
Smelser, G.K., 253
Smith, Dow, 158
Smith, George F., 103
Smith, Richard G., 205
smoothing by spectral dispersion (SSD),

170
Smullen, Louis, 175
Snavely, Ben, 95, 161, 162, 163
Snitzer, Elias, 56, 101, 102, 104, 187,
195196, 197, 280
Soffer, Bernard, 95
SOFIA telescope, 252
soft contact lenses, 253, 256
SOI modulator (silicon-on-insulator
modulator), 294
solar cells, 332
solar panels, 332
solar power, 329, 332
Solarz, Richard W., 162
solid-state lasers, 4, 84, 101, 103106,
125, 126, 131, 178, 227, 228, 231,
242, 316
105106
tunable lasers, 105, 232236, 233235
solid-state lighting, 339
solid-state masers, 50
soliton laser, 241
solitons, 4, 25, 117, 215, 216
Soltys, T.J., 108
Sommerfeld, Arnold, 17, 40
SommerfeldKossel displacement, 17
Sony, 138, 140, 141
Sorokin, Peter, 94, 103, 104, 104, 107
Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF),
249
space race, 85
Spaeth, Mary, 9495, 96, 96
special relativity, 12
speckle photography, 145
spectacles. See eyeglasses
spectra, 2021
chemical elements, 21
infrared spectral lines, 18
multiplets, 17
singlets, doublets, and triplets, 17
SommerfeldKossel displacement, 17
stellar spectra, 13
Spectra Diode Laboratories Inc., 228, 229
Spectra-Physics, 89, 90, 91, 9799, 121,
129, 130, 131, 234, 305
spectral multiplexing, 308
spectral reectance factor, 43
spectrometers, 50, 305
spectrophotometers, 43, 44
spectroscopic instruments, 20
applied spectroscopy, 20, 4950
astronomy and, 13, 13, 1819
atomic physics and, 1213, 13
coherent anti-Stokes Raman (CARS)
with continuous-wave dye lasers, 96
Doppler-free laser spectroscopy, 220
dynamic grating spectroscopy, 219
early history, 1721
femtosecond absorption spectroscopy,
180
ame-emission spectroscopy, 20
uorescence correlation spectroscopy,
312
laser-based spectroscopy, 147, 232
(LIBS), 178
laser spectroscopy, 218219, 221222
linear spectroscopy, 218219
nonlinear spectroscopy, 215, 219221
optical modulation spectroscopy, 219
optical spectroscopy, 3, 17, 19, 21, 24,
50, 175, 218, 220, 335
quantum mechanics and, 1718
Raman spectroscopy, 19, 310
resonant Raman spectroscopy, 218

time-domain laser spectroscopy, 219
transient grating spectroscopy, 238
spectrum, 12
Spencer, William, 62
Spencer Lens Co., 24
spin-orbit coupling, 18
spincasting manufacturing technique,
253, 254
Spitzer, Lyman, 249, 252
Spitzer telescope system, 249, 251, 252
SPM (self-phase modulation), 117, 215
Sprint, 278
Sputnik, 52, 73, 79, 85, 157, 185
spy satellites, 79
157160, 159
154156, 158
Sputnik, 52, 73, 79, 85, 157, 185
See also surveillance imaging
SRI International, 86
Srinivasan, R., 257, 258, 259, 260, 261
SSD (smoothing by spectral dispersion),
170
STAAR, 262, 264
Standard Oil (Indiana), 24
Standard Telecommunications Laboratory
(STL), 199
Stanford Research Institute, 86
Stanford University, 96, 105, 186, 196,
220, 225
Starre Optical Range, 29
Starkweather, Gary, 134, 135
Steane, Andrew, 321
STED (stimulated emission depletion
microscopy), 311
Steinvall, Ove, 178
stellar spectra, 13
stereoscopic surveillance imaging, 51
Stetson, Karl, 145
Stevenson, Mirek, 84, 103, 104, 104, 107
Steward Observatory, 246
Stickley, C. Martin, 185, 186
still photography, 34
Stimson, F.J., 20
stimulated emission depletion microscopy
(STED), 311
Stitch, Malcolm, 84
STL (Standard Telecommunications
Laboratory), 199
STN (super-twisted nematic), 270
stochastic optical reconstruction
microscopy (STORM), 311
Stoicheff, Boris, 115, 116, 221
Stokes, G.G., 19
Stolen, R.H., 215, 216
STORM (stochastic optical reconstruction
microscopy), 311
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), 151
Stratoscope project, 249
Stratton, Samuel W., 27
Straus, Josef, 285
Strehl ratio, 256
stretched-pulse lasers, 242
Strickland, D., 235, 242
stripe-contact technology, 201, 203
stripe-geometry lasers, 111, 203
Stroke, George W., 122
Strong, Henry, 31
Strong, John, 69, 70, 71, 245
Stroud, Carlos, 9, 23, 96
structured light imaging, 328
Struve, Horst, 165
Struve, Wilhelm, 14
Stuhlmann, Otto, 69
sub-Doppler laser cooling, 222
subshells, 17
Sugimoto, Nobuo, 175
Index
353
Sullivan, Walter, 84
Sumski, S., 111
Sun-powered laser, 101
Super Kodak Six-20 camera, 3637, 36
super-twisted nematic (STN), 270
supercontinuum, 216, 216
supermarket barcode scanners, 129131
superresolution, 311
surface-enhanced Raman scattering
(SERS), 316
surface plasmon resonance, 312
surgery, 306
309312, 334335
259, 306
306, 308, 312
nanosurgery, 312
260, 261
See also ophthalmic surgery
19541974, 6467
157160, 159
154156, 158
Sputnik, 52, 73, 79, 85, 157, 185
stereoscopic surveillance imaging, 51
U-2 spy plane, 49, 52, 6467, 66, 157,
158
See also spy satellites
Svanberg, Sune, 175
Sweden NDRI, 177
SX-70 color lm, 52
Symbol Technology, 132
synthetic rubber, 4950
Talanov, Vladimir, 116

Talon Gold, 151
Tanner, Howard, 71
Tappert, F., 117, 215
TAT-12, 282283
TDM PON technology, 291
Teague, Walter Dorwin, 37
Technical Research Group Inc. (TRG), 82,
84, 100, 149, 186
TecnisIOL lens, 263
telecom bubble, 277, 304
telecommunications industry, 282286
telephony, 26, 203207, 204, 206, 207,
279, 282
teleportation, 321
telescopes, 4, 11, 1314, 184, 249252,
250, 251
Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility
(AXAF), 249
Chandra X-ray Observatory, 249, 251,
251
Compton Gamma Ray Observatory
(CGRO), 249
Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), 248
Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), 248
Great Observatories, 249, 252
245248
Hubble Space Telescope (HST), 4, 13,
143, 184, 247, 249250, 250, 251,
252
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST),
252
Keck Ten-Meter-Diameter Telescope
Project, 248
Kepler space telescope, 252
354
Index
Kitt Peak National Observatory, 245,

246
Large Space Telescope (LST), 249
laser propulsion, 336337
lasers in, 184, 245248, 251, 252
Mt. Palomar observatory, 4, 18, 244,
245
Mt. Wilson Observatory, 18, 244, 247
Next Generation Space Telescope
(NGST), 252
refractors, 14
SOFIA telescope, 252
Space Infrared Telescope Facility
(SIRTF), 249
space telescopes, 249252, 250, 251
spectroscopy and, 13, 13
Spitzer telescope system, 249, 251, 252
Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), 248
television, 53, 270
Teller, Edward, 162
10-J Janus laser, 168
TeraMobile project, 305
terbium ions, 104
Terhune, R., 115, 219
Tesla, Nikola, 23
Tessar lens, 32, 33, 35
tetrahertz radiation spectrometer, 305
Texas Instruments, 50, 105, 185
TFT LCD (thin lm transistor liquid
crystal display), 270272, 271
Thack, Robert, 211
Thelen, Alfred, 70
theory of entanglement, 323
theory of special relativity, 12
thermal evaporation, 69
thin lm coatings, 73
thin lm interference, 68
thin lm polarizers, 71
thin lm transistor liquid crystal display
(TFT LCD), 270272, 271
thin lms, 72
third-order nonlinear interactions, 215
35-mm precision cameras, 34
Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), 248
Thomas, L., 178
Thompson, Kevin, 64, 79, 157
Thomson, J.J., 12
Thomson-CSF, 139
three-dimensional movies, 51
three-level lasers, 83
Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 164
three-section tunable DBR lasers, 293
ThreeFive Photonics, 293
thulium ions, 104
time-averaged holography, 145
time-domain laser spectroscopy, 219
time-domain reectometry, 328
tipping furnace, 200, 200
titanium:sapphire laser, 234, 235, 236,
242, 304
TMT (Thirty Meter Telescope), 248
TN effect (twisted nematic effect), 270
Tolman, Richard C., 27
Tomsk Laser Institute (Russia), 178
Tonucci, R.J., 298
Topics in Biomedical Optics (BIOMED
meeting), 313
topological quantum computation, 322
toric contact lenses, 255, 256
toric intraocular lenses, 264
Toschek, P.E., 220
Total Quality Movement, 63
touch panels, 271
Tourist Multiple camera, 34
Townes, Charles, 50, 79, 81, 82, 82, 85,
103, 107, 116, 149, 209, 218,
246247
TPF (two-photon-induced uorescence),

238
transient grating spectroscopy, 238
Tretyakov, Dmitriy N., 111
TRG (Technical Research Group Inc.), 82,
84, 100, 149, 186
Trion Instruments Inc., 100, 114
triplet-state absorption, of dyes, 95
tristimulus integrator, 43
Trokel, Stephen, 259, 260
troland (unit), 38
Troland, Leonard Thompson, 38, 39, 43
Trukan, M.K., 111
Truman, Harry, 29
TRW, 150
Tuccio, Sam, 95, 161, 163
Tukey, John W., 65
tunable dye lasers, 4, 9496, 95, 161
tunable optical parametric oscillators, 176
tunable quantum cascade lasers, 176
tunable solid state lasers, 105, 232236,
233235
Tuohy, Kevin, 253
Turner, Arthur Francis, 70, 72, 246
Twain, Mark, 335
twisted nematic (TN) effect, 270
two-photon-induced uorescence (TPF),
238
two-photon microscopes, 305
two-wavelength holography, 145
TwymanGreen interferometer, 144
Tyndall, John, 53
U-2 spy plane, 49, 52, 6467, 66, 157, 158

U-235, laser isotope enrichment, 161
Uchino, Osamu, 179
Uhlenbeck, George, 18
ultra-low-loss bers, 327
ultrafast electro-optic sampling systems,
305
Ultrafast Epiphany: The Rise of Ultrafast
Science and Technology in the Real
World (CLEO paper), 305
ultrafast-laser technology, 304306, 305,
306
ultrafast manufacturing systems, 306
ultrashort lasers, 306
ultrashort-pulse lasers, 96, 237242,
239242
Unar lenses, 35
uncertainty principle, 18
United States Army Signal Corps, 72
United States Enrichment Corp., 164, 165
United Technology Research Center, 186
Universal Jewel professional folding dry
plate camera, 35
University of Arizona, 176, 246, 248
University of Arizona, Optical Sciences
Center, 86
University of Chicago, 29, 186
University of Illinois, 62, 178, 186, 228
University of Maryland, 97, 186
University of Michigan, 213, 306
University of Michigan, Willow Run
Laboratories, 86, 100, 119, 120, 122
University of North Carolina, 186
University of Pennsylvania, 186
University of Pittsburgh, Mellon Institute,
71
University of Rochester, Institute of
Optics, 25, 33, 54, 134, 143, 158,
168, 169, 170, 185, 186, 304
University of Southampton, 196, 197, 242
University of Toronto, 116, 177
University of WisconsinMadison, 230
Univis, 266
up-conversion gating, 238
Upatniek, Juris, 119120, 120

UPC symbol, 128, 129
UPC Symbology Committee, 128
Ur-Leica camera, 35
uranium, laser isotope enrichment,
161163
uranium-doped calcium uoride, 104
Urbach, John, 135
U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), 29, 164
U.S. National Bureau of Standards, 20, 24,
25, 26, 27, 43, 185
U.S. Naval Observatory, 26
U.S. Rubber, 24
vacuum ultraviolet spectroscopy, 20

van Driel, Henry, 297
van Eijkelenborg, Martijn, 299
van Heel, Abraham C.S., 50, 54
VanderLugt, Anthony, 120
Varian Associates, 100, 187
Vasicek, Antonin, 7172
Vaughan, Art, 250
Vavilov, Sergey, 114
Vavilov State Optical Institute, 121
vectograph, 51
VHS tape, 138
vibronic lasers, 233
videotex, 279
Virtual Journal for Biomedical Optics, 313
visibility, 43
vision, 3839, 39
vision correction, 306
contact lenses, 183, 184, 253256, 254,
255, 260, 262, 333
259, 306
LASIK (laser in situ keratomileusis), 5,
183, 260, 261, 306, 308, 312
260, 261
in vitro methods, 310312
in vivo imaging, 308310
See also eyeglasses; ophthalmic surgery
vision research, 10, 3841
Vistakon Co., 255
visual reception, 3839
vitamin A, 40, 41
Vogel, Hermann Wilhelm, 13
von Fraunhofer, Joseph, 12, 13
Von Graefe, A., 265
von Neumann, John, 107
Vul, R.M., 107
Vulcan laser, 169
vulcanite, 15
Wald, George, 4041, 41

Wallop, Malcolm, 151
Walther, Herbert, 175
Wang, Charles C., 177, 179
Warburg, Otto, 41
Watson, Gene, 97
Watson Research Center, 84, 94

wave nature of light, 1112
waveparticle duality, 12
wave theory of light, 11, 69
wavefront reconstruction, 121
wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM),
210211, 280, 282283, 284,
288289, 290, 291, 293
wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM)
coupler, 196, 210, 211
Webb, Watt, 310, 311
Wehrenberg, Paul J., 138, 140
Weiman, Carl, 221, 225
Weinreich, Gabriel, 114
Weisner, J.B., 27
Welch Allyn, Inc., 131
Welford, Walter, 72
Wenzel, Robert, 163
Werner, Christian, 178
Werner, Dick, 153, 154
Western Electric Research Laboratories,
25
Westinghouse, George, 23
Westinghouse Research Laboratory, 24,
26, 100, 128, 150, 185, 270
WF/PC (Wide-Field Planetary Camera),
250
Wheelon, Albert Bud, 153
White, Alan, 88, 89, 89
White, George, 135, 136
white-light continuum, 304
white-light supercontinuum, 300, 300
Whitehouse, Dave, 187
Wichterle, Otto, 253, 254
wide-eld-of-view camera, 4
Wide-Field Planetary Camera (WF/PC),
250
Williams, Richard, 269
Williams, Robert E., 39
Willner, Alan E., 338
Willow Run Laboratories, 86, 100, 119,
120, 122
Wilson, Joseph C., 61, 61
windshield polarizer, 51
Winker, David, 176
WIRE space telescope, 252
WISE space telescope, 252
WMAP space telescope, 252
Wood, Robert, 34
Wood, R.W., 19, 19
Woodall, Jerry, 110
Woodbury, Eric, 115
Workshop on Optical and Laser Remote
Sensing, 178
World War I, 15, 24, 25, 33, 49
World War II, 3, 26, 41, 4950, 51, 85,
185, 245
aerial cameras, 66
optical coatings, 7071
World Wide Web, 279, 282
WORM media (write-once
read-many-times media), 140
Worokin, Peter, 84
Wratten & Wainwright, 33
Wright, Fred E., 24, 25
Wright Air Development Command, 65
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, 186

writable and re-writable discs,
139140
write-once read-many-times (WORM)
media, 140
Wu, Shin-Tson, 269, 271
Wurzburg, E.L., Jr., 44
Wyant, James C., 143, 246
WYKO Corp., 144
Wynne, James J., 257261, 308
x-ray tube, 24
xerography, 5763, 5861, 134
Xerography and Related Processes
(Dessauer), 57
Xerox 914, 57, 59
Xerox 7000, 135136
Xerox 9700 Electronic Printing System,
137
Xerox copiers, 50
Xerox Corp., 50, 57, 63, 134,
135, 137
Xerox Model A processor, 58, 58
Xerox PARC, 227, 228
Yablonovitch, Eli, 332

YAG lasers (yttrium aluminum garnet
lasers), 104, 105, 124, 125, 186,
225, 240, 242, 257, 258, 259, 301,
304
Yahashi, I., 111
Yale University, 91
Yamane, Tets, 225
Yariv, A., 297
Yeh, P., 297
Yerkes Observatory, 14, 244
Young, Thomas, 11, 14, 68, 69
ytterbium-doped lasers, 106
ytterbium ber, 304
ytterbium-ber lasers, 242
ytterbium ions, 104, 105
yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG) lasers,
104, 105, 124, 125, 186, 225, 240,
242, 257, 258, 259, 301, 304
Yule, J.A.C., 44
Zeiger, H.J., 50, 109

Zeiss, Carl, 9, 14, 23, 35
Zeiss, Roderich, 35
Zeiss (company), 15, 33
Zeiss Foundation, 35
Zeiss Ikon AG, 35
Zeiss/IMRA, 305
Zeldovich, Boris Ya., 116
Zenker, Gabriel, 69
Zernike, Frits, 54
Zeta laser, 168
Zimar, Frank, 191
zinc germanium phosphide (ZGP), 215
Zoller, Peter, 321
Zuev, Vladimir, 178
Index
355

Century of Optics

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OSA Centur y

Left to right from top left:

Color iStock.com/Roman Samokhin

OSA Century of Optics

OSA Century of Optics

History Book Advisory Group

OSA Staff Contributors

2010 Massachusetts Ave NW

Optics in the Nineteenth Century

Spectroscopy from 1916 to 1940

Government and Industrial Research Laboratories

Camera History 1900 to 1940

OSA and the Early Days of Vision Research

Evolution of Color Science through the Lens of OSA

Inventions and Innovations of Edwin Land

Birth of Fiber-Optic Imaging and Endoscopes

Xerography: an Invention That Became a Dominant Design

U.S. Peacetime Strategic Reconnaissance Cameras, 19541974: Legacy of James

History of Optical Coatings and OSA before 1960

The Discovery of the Laser

Postwar Employment Bubble Bursts

Gas LasersThe Golden Decades, 19601980

Discovery of the Tunable Dye Laser

The Birth of the Laser Industry: Overview

Lasers at American Optical and Laser Incorporated

Semiconductor Diode Lasers: Early History

Lasers and the Growth of Nonlinear Optics

Early Years of Holography

History of Laser Materials Processing

Brief History of Barcode Scanning

Developing the Laser Printer

History of the Optical Disc

Interferometric Optical Metrology

Half a Century of Laser Weapons

KH-9 Hexagon Spy in the Sky Reconnaissance Satellite

CORONA Reconnaissance Satellite

Laser Isotope Enrichment

Lasers for Fusion Research

History of Laser Remote Sensing, Laser Radar, and Lidar

Through a Glass Brightly: Low-Loss Fibers for Optical Communications

Advent of Continuous-Wave Room-Temperature Operation of Diode Lasers

Remembering the Million Hour Laser

Terabit-per-Second Fiber Optical Communication Becomes Practical

Applied Nonlinear Optics

Linear and Nonlinear Laser Spectroscopy

Optical Trapping and Manipulation of Small Particles by Laser Light Pressure

High-Power, Reliable Diode Lasers and Arrays

Tunable Solid-State Lasers

Ground-Based Telescopes and Instruments

Space Telescopes for Astronomy

Contact Lenses for Vision Correction: A Journey from Rare to Commonplace

Intraocular Lenses: A More Permanent Alternative

Spectacles: Past, Present, and Future

Major Milestones in Liquid Crystal Display Development

Birth and Growth of the Fiber-Optic Communications Industry

Telecommunications Bubble Pumps Up the Optical Fiber Communications Conference

The Evolution of Optical Communications Networks since 1990

New Wave Microstructured Optical Fibers

Ultrafast-Laser Technology from the 1990s to Present

Biomedical Optics: In Vivo and In Vitro Applications

Novel Optical Materials in the Twenty-First Century

Quantum Information Science: Emerging No More

View of the Future of Light

The 100-Year Future for Optics