Megamaser be very different from those that produce galactic water masers. Observations of water megamasers have been used to make accurate measurements of distances to galaxies in order to provide constraints on the Hubble constant. The word maser derives from the acronym MASER, which stands for "Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". The maser is a predecessor to lasers, which operate at optical wavelengths, and is named by the replacement of "microwave" with "light". Given a system of atoms or molecules, each with different energy states, an atom or molecule may absorb a photon and move to a higher energy
Sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation emission takes place in the structure under electrical pumping. A bias voltage is applied to a weakly coupled n-doped GaAs/AlAs superlattice and increases the amplitude of the coherent hypersound oscillations generated by a femtosecond optical pulse. An evidence of hypersound amplification by stimulated emission of phonons emerges, in a system where the inversion of the electron populations for phonon-assisted transitions exists. This evidence is provided by the bias-induced amplitude increase and experimentally observer spectral narrowing of the superlattice phonon mode with a frequency of 441 GHz. The main target of this type of experiments is to highlight the realization probability