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 emission takes place in the structure under electrical pumping. A bias voltage is applied to a weakly coupled n-doped GaAs/AlAs superlattice and increases the amplitude of the coherent hypersound oscillations generated by a femtosecond optical pulse. An evidence of hypersound amplification by stimulated emission of phonons emerges, in a system where the inversion of the electron populations for phonon-assisted transitions exists. This evidence is provided by the bias-induced amplitude increase and experimentally observer spectral narrowing of the superlattice phonon mode with a frequency of 441 GHz. The main target of this type of experiments is to highlight the realization probability