Question

State the difference between laser light and ordinary light.

Answer 1

Hint: Ordinary light is that part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is visible to us. The ordinary light is divided into seven base colors viz. Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. This order can be easily remembered using ‘VIBGYOR’. Whereas LASER is a form of radiation. They both differ in many aspects. We will see the major differences between them.

Complete answer:
LASER stands for Light Amplification Of Stimulated Emission of Radiation. As the name itself suggests, it produces light by stimulated emission of radiation. That means, the process in which an excited electron is coming back to its ground state, it is again excited by some photonic energy causing the electron to again get excited and move to a higher energy level.

This process continues and more and more electrons get involved, resulting in the emission of radiation, called Laser light.

It uses a p-n junction in it’s working. One of the major differences between LASER and ordinary light is that in ordinary light, some electrons get excited when given energy (Say in the form of electricity), they release energy and come back to their ground state. Whereas in lasers, this process repeatedly occurs and hence is called stimulated emission.

One more difference in both is that ordinary light, generated from any source, gets spread into all directions possible, whereas in Laser, the photons travel unidirectionally.

Note:
There are many more differences between the two like ordinary light is mostly unpolarized whereas laser light is polarized. Laser light is monochromatic and ordinary light is the mixture of several colored lights. Ordinary light shows a large amount of scattering whereas laser light shows negligible scattering.