Hi! My name is Michelle Shinn.
I’m a physicist at Jefferson Lab, working in the Free-Electron Laser division.
And I’m going to talk to you today about lasers.
So, the LASER is an acronym, 
Standing for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
And stimulated emission was actually predicted by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s.
So lasers come, actually, in a number of forms.
You can have a liquid form, as represented by this laser dye. 
A gaseous form as represented by this green helium neon laser. 
Or a solid state form like this laser pointer.
Now "solid state" means that it is a solid material. 
In this case, it’s a crystal like the laser crystal in my ring.
And as you can see, it produces laser light. 
Lasers are pretty ubiquitous now. 
In your house, 
your dvd player, 
your cd/dvd burner all use lasers.
Here at Jefferson Lab, of course we have lots of those, too… 
And we also use them 
To produce the electrons that are then accelerated in our accelerators. 
