Spaser Spaser A spaser or plasmonic laser is a type of laser which aims to confine light at a subwavelength scale far below Rayleigh's diffraction limit of light, by storing some of the light energy in electron oscillations called surface plasmon polaritons. The phenomenon was first described by Bergman and Stockman in 2003. The word "spaser" is an acronym for "surface plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The first such devices were announced in 2009 by three groups: a 44-nanometer-diameter nanoparticle with a gold core surrounded by a dyed silica gain medium created by researchers from Purdue, Norfolk State and
Stimulated emission an atomic or molecular resonance, the spectral line shape function is described as a Lorentzian distribution where formula_12 is the full width at half maximum or FWHM bandwidth. The peak value of the Lorentzian line shape occurs at the line center, formula_13. A line shape function can be normalized so that its value at formula_9 is unity; in the case of a Lorentzian we obtain Thus stimulated emission at frequencies away from formula_9 is reduced by this factor. In practice there may also be broadening of the line shape due to inhomogeneous broadening, most notably due to the Doppler effect