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F'
318 Lasers
service (even allowing for the fact that radio brought upon us the plague ofpop music); microwaves have been useful (how else could you see tt. orympli finals in some far away country from your armchair in Tunbridge wells);'so coherent light should be useful for something. The military who remembered that radar was useful also hoped that laser would be good for something, and they gave their blessing (and their monsy

too!). Another powerful contributing factor was the human urge to achieve new records. I could never understand why a man should be happier if he managed to run faster by one-tenth of a second than anyone else in the world. But that is how it is. If once a number is altached to some performance, there will be no shortage of men trying to reduce or increase that number (whatever the case may be). And so it is with coherent radiation. Man feels his duty to explore the electromagnetic spectrum and produce coherent waves of higher and higher
frequencies.

There may have been some other motives too, but there was no unbridled optirnism concerning immediate applications. what can we say some 40 years later? well, the military were apparently right. They got a guidance system out of it \4'hich can direct a bomb dropped by an aeroplane inro the mi<idle of a plate of lentils. and there are. very likely, lots of other applications in the pipeline. The ray-gun, that favourite dream ofboys, science fiction writers, and generals mav not be very far from realization. what about civilian applications? There are many of them in the medical field; there is optical radar. but of course the rrost important applications to date har.e been the compact disc and optical . communications. There are manv scientific applications too. we shall start u ith them.

12.13.1 Nonlinearoptics
The r.vhole subject, the study of non-linear phenomena at optical frequencies, rvas practically born with the laser.

12.13.2 Spectroscopy
An old subject has been given
unattainable.
a new lease of life by the invention of tunable lasers. Spectroscopists have now both pou'er and spectral purity previously

12.13.3 Photochemistry
Carefully selected high-energy states may be excited in certain substances, and their chemical properties may be studied.

12.13.4 Study of rapid events

With the aid of picosecond and sub-picosecond light pulses. a large number of rapidly occurring phenomena may be studied in physics, chemistry, and biology. The usual technique is to generate a phenomenon by a strong pulse and probe it by another time-delayed pulse. A field in which these techniques have been