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and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.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
Maser Maser A maser (, an acronym for "microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation") is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and H. J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are used as the timekeeping device in atomic clocks, and as extremely low-noise microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep space spacecraft communication ground stations. Modern masers can be designed