Problems, references and illustrations are included throughout the book. Second, it can also provide a solid and detailed description of laser physics and the operational properties of lasers for the practicing engineer or scientist who needs to learn about lasers in order to work on or with them. Finally, the advanced sections of this text are sufficiently detailed that this book will provide a useful one-volume reference for the experienced laser engineer or laser researcher's bookshelf. The discussions of advanced laser topics, such as optical resonators, Q-switching, mode locking, and injection locking, extend far enough into the current state of the art to provide a working reference on these and similar topics. References for further reading in the recent literature are included in nearly every section.
Many people think of lasers as quantum devices.
In fact, however, most of the basic concepts of laser physics, and virtually all the practical details, are classical in nature. In the analogous case of semiconductor electronics, for example, the transistor is not usually thought of as a quantum device. Mental images of holes and electrons as classical charged particles which accelerate, drift, diffuse and recombine are used both by semiconductor device engineers to do practical device engineering, and by solid-state physics researchers to understand sophisticated physics experiments. These classical concepts serve to explain and make understandable what is otherwise a complex quantum picture of energy bands, Bloch wavefunctions, Fermi-Dirac distributions, and occupied or unoccupied quantum states. The same simplification can be accomplished for lasers, and laser devices can then be very well understood from a primarily classical viewpoint, with only limited appeals to quantum terms or concepts.