Laser Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work. At a conference in 1959, Gordon Gould published the term LASER in the paper "The LASER, Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation". Gould's linguistic intention was using the "-aser" word particle as a suffix – to accurately denote the spectrum of the light emitted by the LASER device; thus x-rays: "xaser", ultraviolet: "uvaser", et cetera; none established itself as a discrete term, although "raser" was briefly popular for denoting radio-frequency-emitting devices. Gould's notes included
Stimulated emission resulting from the distribution of velocities in a gas at a certain temperature. This has a Gaussian shape and reduces the peak strength of the line shape function. In a practical problem the full line shape function can be computed through a convolution of the individual line shape functions involved. Therefore, optical amplification will add power to an incident optical field at frequency formula_17 at a rate given by The stimulated emission cross section is where Stimulated emission can provide a physical mechanism for optical amplification. If an external source of energy stimulates more than 50% of the atoms in