Sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation was first experimentally demonstrated in the Gigahertz range in 2009. Announced in 2010, two independent groups came up with two different devices that produce coherent phonons at any frequency in the range megahertz to terahertz. One group from the University of Nottingham consisted of A.J. Kent and his colleagues R.P. Beardsley, A.V. Akimov, W. Maryam and M. Henini. The other group from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) consisted of Ivan S. Grudinin, Hansuek Lee, O. Painter and Kerry J. Vahala from Caltech implemented a study on Phonon Laser Action in a tunable two-level system. The University of Nottingham device
Sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation electrons become localized in the quantum wells and vertical electron transport takes place via hopping between neighboring quantum wells, which may be phonon assisted. As it had been shown previously, under these conditions stimulated phonon emission can become the dominant phonon-assisted hoping process for phonons of an energy value close to the Stark splitting. Thus, coherent phonon amplification is theoretically possible in this type of system. Together with the increase in amplitude, the spectrum of the bias-induced oscillations is narrower than the spectrum of the coherent phonons at zero bias. This shows that coherent amplification of phonons due to stimulated