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Chandra Kumar Naranbhai Patel developed the carbon dioxide laser in 1963; it is now widely used in industry for cutting and welding, as a laser scalpel in surgery, and in laser skin resurfacing. Because the atmosphere is quite transparent to infrared light, CO2 lasers are also used for military rangefinding using LIDAR techniques.
Patel was born in Baramati, India, and received a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the College of Engineering Pune, the University of Pune, India and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1959 and 1961, respectively. Patel joined Bell Laboratories in 1961, and subsequently became Executive Director of the Research, Materials Science, Engineering and Academic Affairs Division at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he developed the carbon dioxide laser. Patel's discovery, in 1963, of the laser action on the vibrational-rotational transitions of carbon dioxide and his discovery, in 1964, of efficient vibrational energy transfer between molecules, led to a series of experiments which demonstrated that the carbon dioxide laser was capable of very high continuous-wave and pulsed power output at very high conversion efficiencies.
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