Laser Technology
The earliest lasers were unsuited for AMO physics because they were at fixed wavelengths. The first true, broadly-tunable lasers were dye lasers in 1966 and they were first made spectrally narrow in 1972. These were often pumped by nitrogen lasers, and we built our own (see Ref's. [1] and [2]). We also made several changes and improvements to the dye lasers themselves (see Ref's. [3] and [5]).
When the first high-power diode laser bars became available we learned to inject them with light from a low power but narrow-band seed laser Ref. [6]. We explored many variations of these techniques.
When we began our experiments with helium metastables using the 3S1 sublevel as a pseudo-ground state, the only suitable source for the 1083 nm light came from a crystal called LNA (see Ref. [8]) and we made many variations of this laser. With the advent of lower-power diode lasers at this wavelength, and fiber ampifiers from the telecom companies, we were able to use much higher powers of such light (see Ref. [12]).