Laser technologyR. E. Slusher Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974Laser technology during the 20th century is reviewed emphasizing the lasers evolution from science to technology and subsequent contributions of laser technology to science. As the century draws to a close, lasers are making strong contributions to communications, materials processing, data storage, image recording, medicine, and defense. Examples from these areas demonstrate the stunning impact of laser light on our society. Laser advances are helping to generate new science as illustrated by several examples in physics and biology. Free-electron lasers used for materials processing and laser accelerators are described as developing laser technologies for the next century.S0034-6861(99)02802-01. INTRODUCTIONLight has always played a central role in the study of physics, chemistry, and biology. Light is key to both the evolution of the universe and to the evolution of life on earth. This century a new form of light, laser light, has been discovered on our small planet and is already facilitating a global information transformation as well as providing important contributions to medicine, industrial material processing, data storage, printing, and defense. This review will trace the developments in science and technology that led to the invention of the laser and give a few examples of how lasers are contributing to both technological applications and progress in basic science. There are many other excellent sources that cover various aspects of the lasers and laser technology including articles from the 25th anniversary of the laser (Ausubell and Langford, 1987) and textbooks (e.g., Siegman, 1986; Agrawal and Dutta, 1993; and Ready, 1997). Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (LASER) is achieved by exciting the electronic, vibrational, rotational, or cooperative modes of a material into a nonequilibrium state so that photons propagating through the system are amplified coherently by stimulated emission. Excitation of this optical gain medium can be accomplished by using optical radiation, electrical current and discharges, or chemical reactions. The amplifying medium is placed in an optical resonator structure, for example between two high reflectivity mirrors in a Fabry-Perot interferometer configuration. When the gain in photon number for an optical mode of the cavity resonator exceeds the cavity loss, as well as loss from nonradiative and absorption processes, the coherent state amplitude of the mode increases to a levelwhere the mean photon number in the mode is larger than one. At pump levels above this threshold condition,the system is lasing and stimulated emission dominates spontaneous emission. A laser beam is typically coupled out of the resonator by a partially transmitting mirror. The wonderfully useful properties of laser radiation include spatial coherence, narrow spectral emission, high power, and well-defined spatial modes so that the beam can be focused to a diffraction-limited spot size in order to achieve very high intensity. The high efficiency of laser light generation is important in many applications that require low power input and a minimum of heat generation.When a coherent state laser beam is detected using photon-counting techniques, the photon count distribution in time is Poissonian. For example, an audio output from a high efficiency photomultiplier detecting a laser field sounds like rain in a steady downpour. This laser noise can be modified in special cases, e.g., by constant current pumping of a diode laser to obtain a squeezed number state where the detected photons sound more like a machine gun than rain. An optical amplifier is achieved if the gain medium is not in a resonant cavity. Optical amplifiers can achievevery high gain and low noise. In fact they presently have noise figures within a few dB of the 3 dB quantum noise limit for a phase-insensitive linear amplifier, i.e., they add little more than a factor of two to the noise power of an input signal. Optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs), where signal gain is achieved by nonlinear coupling of a pump field with signal modes, can be configured to add less than 3 dB of noise to an input signal. In an OPA the noise added to the input signal can be dominated by pump noise and the noise contributed by a laser pump beam can be negligibly small compared to the large amplitude of the pump field.2. HISTORYEinstein (1917) provided the first essential idea for the laser, stimulated emission. Why wasnt the laser invented earlier in the century? Much of the early work on stimulated emission concentrates on systems near equilibrium, and the laser is a highly nonequilibrium system. In retrospect the laser could easily have been conceived and demonstrated using a gas discharge during the period of intense spectroscopic studies from 1925 to 1940. However, it took the microwave techno