An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A kind of laser where the lasing medium is a gas or a mixture of gases that can be excited with an electric discharge.

The first gas laser to operate successfully was built by A. Javan and William R. Bennette at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
This laser used a mixture of helium and neon as the active medium and produced a continuous beam rather than a series of pulses. This laser operated in the infrared region of the spectrum at 1.15 micrometres. A few years later Kumar Patel developed the CO₂ laser.

See also: → gas; → laser.