History

The first LASER conference was held in 2010 when we celebrated the first operating (ruby) laser, designed and built by an American physicist and engineer Theodore H. Maiman.

Based on the feedback from the first LASER conference, Laser 50, originally intended as single event, we decided to hold another one two years later. Afterwards, we met every year, with the exception of 2020, when we unable to organize the conference due to COVID restrictions.

In Czechoslovakia, 1963 was a pivotal year for the emergence of lasers. The first Czechoslovak laser was launched on 9 April 1963 at the Institute of Physics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences by Dr. Karel Pátek. It used neodymium glass as the active medium. It was, however, invisible, shining in the near-infrared region at a wavelength of around 1060 nm. In the spring of the same year, two more solid-state lasers were built practically simultaneously. Jan Blabla and Alena Jelínková from the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences built a ruby laser, which they presented to the public at the Prague Planetarium, and Dr. Pachman built another ruby laser at the Research Institute of the Ministry of Defence. Subsequently, in the summer of 1963, Tomislav Šimeček commissioned the first semiconductor laser at the Institute of Solid-State Physics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In the autumn of the same year, František Petrů and his team operated the first Czechoslovak gas laser at the Institute of Instrument Technology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Brno.