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 eigenstates of the Hamiltonian as well. These states are equally spaced both in energy and real space and form the so-called Wannier-Stark ladder. In the proposed scheme, an application of an electrical bias to a semiconductor superlattice is increasing the amplitude of coherent folded phonons generated by an optical pulse. This increase of the amplitude is observed for those biases in which the energy drop per period of the superlattice is greater than the phonon energy. If the superlattice is biased such that the energy drop per period of the superlattice exceeds the width of electronic minibands (Wannier-Stark regime), the