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
Sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation means that, since bosons with the same energy can occupy the same place in space, phonons and photons are force carrier particles and they have integer spins. There are more allowed states available for occupancy in a phonon field than in a photon field. Therefore, since the density of terminal states in the phonon field exceeds that in a photon field (by up to ~10), phonon emission is by far the more likely event. We could also imagine a concept where the excitation of an electron briefly leads to vibration of the lattice and thus to phonon generation. The vibration