LASER AND

ITS

APPLICATIONS
 index

S.NO PARTICULARS PG.NO

1. Introduction 1.

2. Background of the project 3.

3. Review of literature 4.

4. Methodology 7.

5. Conclusion 14.

6. References 16.
 INTRODUCTION

The laser is the most important optical device to be developed in

the past 50 years. Since its arrival in the 1960s, it has provided the
stimulus to make optics one of the most rapidly growing fields in
science and technology today.
The laser is essentially an optical amplifier. The word laser is
an acronym that stands for “light amplification by the stimulated
emission of radiation”.
 The qualities of the light generated by a laser are
significantly different from that generated by a conventional
source such as an incandescent light bulb or fluorescent light tube.
These major differences include: divergence: the laser generally
emits a pencil thin beam of light whose divergent angle is closely
related to the wavelength and limiting aperture size. bandwidth:
the light emitted by the laser generally consists of a very narrow
range of wavelengths, or color. intensity: the output from a laser is
typically orders of magnitude higher in intensity (measured in
watts per square meter) than a conventional light source.
coherence; the output from a laser is generally coherent; that is, the
peaks and troughs of the light waves all correspond, allowing the
light to form clear interference patterns.
By far the largest single application of lasers
is in optical storage devices such as compact disc and DVD
players, in which a semiconductor laser less than a millimeter wide
scans the surface of the disc. The second-largest application is
fiber-optic communication. Other common applications of lasers
are bar code readers, laser printers and laser pointers.
In manufacturing, lasers are used for cutting,
bending, and welding metal and other materials, and for
"marking"—producing visible patterns such as letters by changing
the properties of a material or by inscribing its surface. In science,
lasers are used for many applications. One of the more common is
laser spectroscopy, which typically takes advantage of the laser's
well-defined wavelength or the possibility of generating very short
pulses of light. Lasers are used by the military for range-finding,
target designation, and illumination. Lasers have also begun to be
tested for directed-energy weapons. Lasers are used in medicine
for surgery, diagnostics, and therapeutic applications.
The theoretical background of laser action as the basis
for an optical amplifier was made possible by Albert Einstein, as
early as 1917, when he first predicted the existence of a new
irradiative process called “stimulated emission”. His theoretical
work, however, remained largely unexploited until 1954, when
C.H. Townes and Co-workers developed a microwave amplifier
based on stimulated emission radiation. It was called a maser.
In 1960, T.H.Maiman built the first laser device (ruby
laser). Within months of the arrival of Maiman’s ruby laser, which
emitted deep red light at a wavelength of 694.3 nm, A. Javan and
associates developed the first gas laser (He-Ne laser), which
emitted light in both the infrared (at 1.15mm) and visible (at 632.8
nm) spectral regions.
Following the birth of the ruby and He-Ne lasers, others
devices followed in rapid succession, each with a different laser
medium and a different wavelength emission. For the greater part
of the 1960s, the laser was viewed by the world of industry and
technology as scientific curiosity.

BACKGROUND OF
THE
PROJECT
The laser has found its way into many uses in every day life.
The background of this project is to emphasize the application of
laser, and other advanced techniques, to scientific and engineering
investigations.
The major application areas for the laser are in communications,
materials processing, optical data storage, surgery, defense, and
scientific research.
This project contains the following:-

 INTRODUCTION – Introduction gives a brief description of

what a laser is, the qualities of light generated by the laser,
applications of laser and when it came into existence.

 REVIEW OF LITERATURE - This is a note on past

studies. Starting from its foundation to its
Application .

 METHODOLOGY – This contains the focus area of the

project.i.e 3D scanner. It contains the functioning, technology
and applications of a laser scanner.

 CONCLUSION –Conclusion gives a brief description of laser

and its uses.

 RECOMMENDATIONS –This recommends sites, people, and

books from where the information is or can be collected.

REVIEW OF
LITERATURE
 In 1917, Albert Einstein, in his paper Zur Quantentheorie der
Strahlung (On the Quantum Theory of Radiation), laid the
foundation for the invention of the laser and its predecessor, the
maser, in a ground-breaking rederivation of Max Planck's law
 of radiation based on the concepts of probability coefficients
(later to be termed 'Einstein coefficients') for the absorption,
spontaneous emission, and stimulated emission of
electromagnetic radiation.
 In 1928, Rudolph W. Landenburg confirmed the existence of
stimulated emission and negative absorption. In 1939, Valentin
A. Fabrikant predicted the use of stimulated emission to amplify
"short" waves.
 In 1947, Willis E. Lamb and R. C. Retherford found apparent
stimulated emission in hydrogen spectra and made the first
demonstration of stimulated emission.
 In 1950, Alfred Kastler (Nobel Prize for Physics 1966)
proposed the method of optical pumping, which was
experimentally confirmed by Brossel, Kastler and Winter two
years later.
 In 1957, Charles Hard Townes and Arthur Leonard
Schawlow, at Bell Labs, began a serious study of the infrared
laser. As ideas were developed, infrared frequencies were
abandoned with focus on visible light instead. The concept was
originally known as an “optical maser”. At the same time
Gordon Gould, a graduate student at Columbia University,
made notes about his ideas for a "laser" in November 1957,
including suggesting using an open resonator, which became an
important ingredient of future lasers.

In 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open

resonator, the first published appearance of this idea. Schawlow
and Townes also settled on an open resonator design, apparently
unaware of both the published work of Prokhorov and the
unpublished work of Gould.

The term "laser" was first introduced to the public in Gould's

1959 conference paper "The LASER, Light Amplification by
Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Gould intended "-aser" to
be a suffix, to be used with an appropriate prefix for the
spectrum of light emitted by the device (x-rays: xaser,
ultraviolet: uvaser, etc.). None of the other terms became
popular, although "raser" was used for a short time to describe
radio-frequency emitting devices.

The first working laser was made by Theodore H. Maiman in

1960 at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California,
beating several research teams including those of Townes at
Columbia University, Arthur Schawlow at Bell Labs, and Gould
at a company called TRG (Technical Research Group). Maiman
used a solid-state flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to
produce red laser light at 694 nanometers wavelength.
Maiman's laser, however, was only capable of pulsed operation
due to its three-level pumping scheme.

Later in 1960 the Iranian physicist Ali Javan, working with

William R. Bennett and Donald Herriot, made the first gas laser
using helium and neon. Javan later received the Albert Einstein
Award in 1993.

The concept of the semiconductor laser diode was proposed by

Basov and Javan. The first laser diode was demonstrated by
Robert N. Hall in 1962. Hall's device was made of gallium
arsenide and emitted at 850 nm in the near-infrared region of
the spectrum. The first semiconductor laser with visible
emission was demonstrated later the same year by Nick
Holonyak, Jr. As with the first gas lasers, these early
semiconductor lasers could be used only in pulsed operation,
and indeed only when cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures
(77 K).

In 1970, Zhores Alferov in the Soviet Union and Izuo Hayashi

and Morton Panish of Bell Telephone Laboratories
independently developed laser diodes continuously operating at
room temperature, using the heterojunction structure.
RECENT INNOVATIONS:

Since the early period of laser history, laser research has produced
a variety of improved and specialized laser types, optimized for
different performance goals, including:

• new wavelength bands

• maximum average output power
• maximum peak output power
• minimum output pulse duration
• maximum power efficiency
• maximum charging
• maximum firing
• minimum cost

and this research continues to this day.

Lasing without maintaining the medium excited into a population

inversion, was discovered in 1992 in sodium gas and again in 1995
in rubidium gas by various international teams. This was
accomplished by using an external maser to induce "optical
transparency" in the medium by introducing and destructively
interfering the ground electron transitions between two paths, so
that the likelihood for the ground electrons to absorb any energy
has been cancelled.

Methodology

3D scanner
A 3D scanner is a device that analyzes a real-world object or
environment to collect data on its shape and possibly its
appearance (i.e. color). The collected data can then be used to
construct digital, three dimensional models useful for a wide
variety of applications.
Laser scanners can send trillions of light photons toward an object
and only receive a small percentage of those photons back via the
optics that they use. The reflectivity of an object is based upon the
object's color or terrestrial albedo. A white surface will reflect lots
of light and a black surface will reflect only a small amount of
light. Transparent objects such as glass will only refract the light
and give false three dimensional information.

Functionality:
The purpose of a 3D scanner is usually to create a point cloud of
geometric samples on the surface of the subject. These points can
then be used to extrapolate the shape of the subject (a process
called reconstruction).

Technology:
The two types of 3D scanners are contact and non-contact. Non-
contact 3D scanners can be further divided into two main
categories, active scanners and passive scanners. There are a
variety of technologies that fall under each of these categories.

Contact

Contact 3D scanners probe the subject through physical touch. A

CMM (coordinate measuring machine) is an example of a contact
3D scanner. It is used mostly in manufacturing and can be very
precise. The disadvantage of CMMs though, is that it requires
contact with the object being scanned.

Non-Contact Active

Active scanners emit some kind of radiation or light and detect its
reflection in order to probe an object or environment. Possible
types of emissions used include light, ultrasound or x-ray.

Time-of-flight

The time-of-flight 3D laser scanner is an active scanner that uses

laser light to probe the subject. At the heart of this type of scanner
is a time-of-flight laser rangefinder. The laser rangefinder finds the
distance of a surface by timing the round-trip time of a pulse of
light. A laser is used to emit a pulse of light and the amount of
time before the reflected light is seen by a detector is timed.
Triangulation

The triangulation 3D laser scanner is also an active scanner that

uses laser light to probe the environment. With respect to time-of-
flight 3D laser scanner the triangulation laser shines a laser on the
subject and exploits a camera to look for the location of the laser
dot. Depending on how far away the laser strikes a surface, the
laser dot appears at different places in the camera’s field of view.
This technique is called triangulation because the laser dot, the
camera and the laser emitter form a triangle.
Conoscopic Holography

In a Conoscopic system a laser beam is projected onto the surface

and then the immediate reflection along the same ray-path are put
through a conoscopic crystal and projected onto a CCD. The result
is a diffraction pattern, that can be frequency analyzed to
determine the distance to the measured surface. The main
advantage with Conoscopic Holography is that only a single ray-
path is needed for measuring, thus giving an opportunity to
measure for instance the depth of a finely drilled hole.

Handheld Laser

Handheld laser scanners create a 3D image through the

triangulation mechanism described above: a laser dot or line is
projected onto an object from a handheld device and a sensor
(typically a charge-coupled device or position sensitive device)
measures the distance to the surface.

Structured light

Structured light 3D scanners project a pattern of light on the

subject and look at the deformation of the pattern on the subject.
The pattern may be one dimensional or two dimensional. It uses a
technique similar to triangulation to calculate the distance of every
point on the line.

Modulated light

Modulated light 3D scanners shine a continually changing light at

the subject. Usually the light source simply cycles its amplitude in
a sinusoidal pattern. A camera detects the reflected light and the
amount the pattern is shifted by determines the distance the light
traveled. Modulated light also allows the scanner to ignore light
from sources other than a laser, so there is no interference.

Non-Contact Passive
Passive scanners do not emit any kind of radiation themselves, but
instead rely on detecting reflected ambient radiation. Most
scanners of this type detect visible light because it is a readily
available ambient radiation. Other types of radiation, such as
infrared could also be used. Passive methods can be very cheap,
because in most cases they do not need particular hardware.

Stereoscopic

Stereoscopic systems usually employ two video cameras, slightly

apart, looking at the same scene. By analyzing the slight
differences between the images seen by each camera, it is possible
to determine the distance at each point in the images. This method
is based on human

Photometric

Photometric systems usually use a single camera, but take multiple

images under varying lighting conditions. These techniques
attempt to invert the image formation model in order to recover the
surface orientation at each pixel.

Silhouette

These types of 3D scanners use outlines created from a sequence

of photographs around a three-dimensional object against a well
contrasted background. These silhouettes are extruded and
intersected to form the visual hull approximation of the object.
With these kinds of techniques some kind of concavities of an
object (like the interior of a bowl) are not detected.

User Assisted (i.e. Image Based Modeling)

This kind of techniques is useful to build fast approximation of

simple shaped objects like buildings. Various commercial
packages are available like iModeller, D-Sculptor or RealViz-
ImageModeler. This sort of 3D scanning is based on the principles
of photogrammetry.

 Reconstruction
The point clouds produced by 3D scanners are usually not used
directly. Most applications do not use point clouds, but instead use
polygonal 3D models. The process of converting a point cloud into
a polygonal 3D model is called reconstruction. Reconstruction
involves finding and connecting adjacent points in order to create a
continuous surface. Many algorithms are available for this purpose
(e.g. photomodeler, image model).

Applications
Material processing and production

Laser scanning describes a method where a surface is sampled or

scanned using laser technology. Several areas of application exist
that mainly differ in the power of the lasers that are used, and in
the results of the scanning process. Lasers with low power are used
when the scanned surface doesn't have to be influenced, e.g. when
it has to be digitized. Confocal or 3D laser scanning are methods to
get information about the scanned surface.

Depending on the power of the laser, its influence on a working

piece differs: lower power values are used for laser engraving,
where material is partially removed by the laser. With higher
powers the material becomes fluid and laser welding can be
realized, or if the power is high enough to remove the material
completely, then laser cutting can be performed. Also for rapid
prototyping a laser scanning procedure is used when for example a
prototype is generated by laser sintering.
• Construction Industry and Civil Engineering

 As-built drawings of Bridges, Industrial Plants, and

Monuments
 Documentation of historical sites
 Site modeling and lay outing
 Quality control
 Quantity Surveys, etc.

Entertainment

3D scanners are used by the entertainment industry to create digital

3D models for both movies and video games. In cases where a
real-world equivalent of a model exists, it is much faster to scan
the real-world object than to manually create a model using 3D
modeling software. Frequently, artists sculpt physical models of
what they want and scan them into digital form rather than directly
creating digital models on a computer.

Reverse engineering

Reverse engineering of a mechanical component requires a precise

digital model of the objects to be reproduced. Rather than a set of
points a precise digital model can be represented by a polygon
mesh, a set of flat or curved NURBS surfaces, or ideally for
mechanical components, a CAD solid model. A 3D scanner can be
used to digitize free-form or gradually changing shaped
components as well as prismatic geometries whereas a coordinate
measuring machine is usually used only to determine simple
dimensions of a highly prismatic model. These data points are then
processed to create a usable digital model, usually using
specialized reverse engineering software.

Cultural Heritage
The combined use of 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies
allows the replication of real objects without the use of traditional
plaster casting techniques, that in many cases can be too invasive
for being performed on precious or delicate cultural heritage
artifacts. In the side figure the gargoyle model on the left was
digitally acquired by using a 3D scanner and the produced 3D data
was processed using MeshLab. The resulting digital 3D model,
shown in the screen of the laptop, was used by a rapid prototyping
machine to create a real resin replica of original object.

Dental CAD/CAM

Many Chairside dental CAD/CAM systems and Dental Laboratory

CAD/CAM systems use 3D Scanner technologies to capture the
3D surface of a dental preparation (either in vivo or in vitro), in
order to produce a restoration digitally using CAD software and
ultimately produce the final restoration using a CAM technology
(such as a CNC milling machine, or 3D printer). The chairside
systems are designed to facilitate the 3D scanning of a preparation
in vivo and produce the restoration (such as a Crown, Onlay, Inlay
or Veneer).

Orthotics CAD/CAM

Many orthotists also use 3D scanners in order to capture the 3D

shape of a patient. It gradually supplants tedious plaster cast.
CAD/CAM software is then used to design and manufacture the
orthosis or prosthesis.

Quality Assurance

The digitalization of real-world objects is of vital importance in

various application domains. This method is especially applied in
industrial quality assurance to measure the geometric dimension
accuracy.
 conclusion

Lasers have therefore become an integral part of our lives. They

are used in CD/DVD drives, laser printers, surgical and clinical
equipments, precision welding and cutting equipments, in various
flow measurement equipments, in remote sensing and defense
equipments, in holography, communication equipments, in
alignment and leveling instruments etc. The field of application is
expected to grow in future as the scientific community moves
ahead towards the realization of quantum computers, quantum
communication, 3-D data storage devices, terahertz networks etc.
Since the application of lasers spans across various disciplines of
science and engineering and the science behind laser itself is a
conglomeration of ideas from diverse branches of science and
engineering, this field of lasers and its applications is best
addressed in the form of an interdisciplinary area of study and
research.

When lasers were invented in 1960, they were called "a solution
looking for a problem". Since then, they have become ubiquitous,
finding utility in thousands of highly varied applications in every
section of modern society, including consumer electronics,
information technology, science, medicine, industry, law
enforcement, entertainment, and the military.

Thus some of its other applications include:

• Medicine: Bloodless surgery, laser healing, surgical

treatment, kidney stone treatment, eye treatment, dentistry
• Industry: Cutting, welding, material heat treatment, marking
parts
 • Defense: Marking targets, guiding munitions, missile
defence, electro-optical countermeasures (EOCM),
alternative to radar
• Research: Spectroscopy, laser ablation, Laser annealing,
laser scattering, laser interferometry, LIDAR, Laser capture
micro dissection
• Product development/commercial: laser printers, CDs,
barcode scanners, thermometers, laser pointers, holograms,
bubblegrams.
• Laser lighting displays: Laser light shows
• Laser skin procedures such as acne treatment, cellulite
reduction, and hair removal.

references
• www.google.com
• www.answers.com
• en.wikipedia.org
• Gould, R. Gordon (1959). "The LASER, Light Amplification by
Stimulated Emission of Radiation".
• "Laser". Reference.com.
• Townes, Charles Hard. "The first laser". University of Chicago.
• "Schawlow and Townes invent the laser". Lucent Technologies
(1998).
• Dictionary.com - "lase"
• Charles H. Townes (2003). "The first laser". In Laura Garwin
and Tim Lincoln.