\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/hackaday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/maser.png\")
<\/a>Townes with his original maser (public domain).<\/p>\nHowever, there are many engineering challenges to building a maser. For one thing, cavities are bigger than required for lasers. Sources of noise and the mitigations are different, too.<\/p>\n
The maser grew out of radar research in the early 1950s. Charles Townes and others at Columbia University used ammonia in a cavity to produce a 24 GHz maser, completing it in 1953. For his work, he would share the 1964 Nobel Prize for physics with two Soviet physicists, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov, who had also built a maser.<\/p>\n
Eclipsed but Useful<\/p>\n
By 1960, the laser appeared, and the maser was nearly forgotten. After all, a visible-light laser is something anyone can immediately appreciate, and it has many spectacular applications.<\/p>\n
At the time, the naming of maser vs laser was somewhat controversial. Townes wanted to recast the \u201cM\u201d in maser to mean \u201cmolecular,\u201d and pushed to call lasers \u201coptical masers.\u201d But competitors wanted unique names for each type of emission, so lasers for light, grasers for gamma rays, xasers for X-rays, and so on. In the end, only maser and laser stuck.<\/p>\n
Masers have uses beyond fancy physics experiments. Trying to detect signals that are just above the noise floor? Try a cryogenic maser amplifier. That\u2019s one way the NASA Deep Space Network pulls in signals<\/a>. (PDF) You cool a ruby, or other material, to just a bit of 4 \u00b0K and use the output of the resulting maser to pull out signals without adding much noise. This works well for radio astronomy, too.<\/p>\n Need an accurate time base? Over the long term, a cesium clock is the way to go. But over a short period, a hydrogen maser clock will offer less noise and drift. This is also important to radio astronomy for building systems to use very long baseline interferometry. The NASA network also uses masers as a frequency standard<\/a>.<\/p>\n All Natural<\/p>\n