Lasers - Their development and applications at AT&T Bell Laboratories

AT&T Bell Laboratories has played a crucial role in the invention and further development of lasers. In this paper I give a semihistorical account of the key contributions made by Bell Labs scientists. These contributions include the invention of the laser, optical resonator theory, the helium-neon and other atomic gas lasers, the carbon dioxide and other molecular lasers, solid state lasers, dye lasers, semiconductor lasers, ultrashort pulse mode locked lasers, color center lasers, tunable spin flip Raman lasers, and applications such as two photon absorption, nonlinear optics, etc. This review is by no means all encompassing since even just the listing of only the titles of all the publications in the field of quantum electronics by Bell Labs scientists would more than fill this entire issue of
J-QE
.