Optics include illumination engineering, photonics, and optoelectronics with practical applications like lens design, fabrication and testing of optical components, and image processing. Some of these fields overlap, with nebulous boundaries between the subjects terms that mean slightly different things in different parts of the world and in different areas of industry. A professional community of researchers in nonlinear optics has developed in the last several decades due to advances in laser technology. A laser is a device that emits light (electromagnetic radiation) through a process called "stimulated emission". The term "laser" is an acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of
Stimulated emission difference in energies between the two states as a photon. The photon will have frequency "ν" and energy "hν", given by: where "h" is Planck's constant. Alternatively, if the excited-state atom is perturbed by an electric field of frequency "ν", it may emit an additional photon of the same frequency and in phase, thus augmenting the external field, leaving the atom in the lower energy state. This process is known as stimulated emission. In a group of such atoms, if the number of atoms in the excited state is given by "N", the rate at which stimulated emission occurs is