Laser laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians. On May 16, 1960, Theodore H. Maiman operated the first functioning laser at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California, ahead of several research teams, including those of Townes, at Columbia University, Arthur Schawlow, at Bell Labs, and Gould, at the TRG (Technical Research Group) company. Maiman's functional laser used a solid-state flashlamp-pumped synthetic ruby crystal to produce red laser light, at 694 nanometers wavelength; however, the device only was capable of pulsed operation, because of its three-level pumping design scheme. Later that year,
Polariton laser Review Letters" in May 2013). The investigations performed by the team in Würzburg, having started with the idea of engineering an electrical device in 2007, led to the desired effect after a few years in cooperation with their international partners from the U.S., Japan, Russia, Singapore, Iceland and Germany. Finally, their studies were complemented by a crucial experiment in a magnetic field: an unambiguous verification of the emission-mode's matter component in the polaritonic laser regime was given, yielding a first-time experimental demonstration of an electrically pumped polariton laser by C. Schneider, A. Rahimi-Iman and co-authors in the team of S.