Proposal: The Generation of Coherent Infrared Radiation from a Diffraction Grating (Correspondence)

The generation of optical radiation from a diffraction grating has been described by Smith and Purcell and by Salisbury. This communication will report a set of improvements on their method which can lead to coherent radiation. Simple calculations have been performed for two special cases to obtain estimates of the output power available. It appears that such a device could give powers from a microwatt to 0.2 mw in the region of 0.1 to 0.5 mm wavelength. Output power levels of this order are entirely adequate for experiments in high resolution spectroscopy and related problems.