Article

Photons and Atoms

September 2015

DOI:10.1142/9789814612418_0006

Authors:

The first chapter of this book showed that laser light is coherent light concentrated in a given mode of radiation resonant with the optical cavity. This property makes laser light the "cleanest" light that physicists are able to produce, and it is thus quite naturally that the laser, an outcome of fundamental research with multiple applications, made its comeback into laboratories as being itself an object of research. We shall not review here all the advances in fundamental physics resulting from the use of laser light (the interested reader may consult the book by Michel Le Bellac in the same series), but we wish to explain through examples why the approach based on wave-particle duality is particularly fruitful...

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