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Figure 1: Stimulated emission in a two-level transition. Image used with permission (CC BY-SA 4.0; V1adis1av)
It is clear, from the above diagram, that in the two-level atom the pump is, in a way, the laser itself! Such a two-level laser
would work only in jolts. That is to say, once the population inversion is achieved the laser would lase. But immediately it
would end up with more atoms in the lower level. Such two-level lasers involve a more complicated process. We will see, in
later material, examples of these in the context of excimer lasers, which are pulsed lasers. For a continuous laser action we
need to consider other possibilities, such as a three-level atom.
Here, the lower laser level is not the ground state. As a result, even a pump that may not be very efficient could produce
population inversion, so long as the upper level of the laser transition is longer lived than the lower level. Of course, all
attempts are made to design a pump that maximizes the number of excited atoms. A typical four-level laser is the helium-neon
(He-Ne) gas laser. In these lasers electric pumping excites helium atoms to an excited state whose energy is roughly the same
as the upper short-lived state in the neon atom. The sole purpose of the helium atoms is to exchange energy with neon atoms
via collisional excitation. As it turns out, this is a very efficient way of getting neon atoms to lase.
Laser components
All lasers have three primary components:
Medium
Pump
Resonant Cavity
The laser medium can be gaseous, liquid, or a solid. These could include atoms, molecules, or collections of atoms that would
be involved in a laser transition. Typically, a laser is distinguished by its medium, even though two lasers using different media
may have more in common than two which have similar media.