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 given by where the proportionality constant "B" is known as the "Einstein B coefficient" for that particular transition, and "ρ"("ν") is the radiation density of the incident field at frequency "ν". The rate of emission is thus proportional to the number of atoms in the excited state "N", and to the density of incident photons. At the same time, there will be a process of atomic absorption which "removes" energy from the field while raising electrons from the lower state to the upper state. Its rate is given by an essentially identical equation, The rate of absorption is thus proportional