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Margaret Harris

I'm an online editor at Physics World. I write about applied physics research, and generally "fly the flag" for the practical and commercial side of physics within the Physics World team. I joined Physics World in 2008, shortly after completing my PhD in experimental atomic physics at Durham University, but I’m not from these parts originally: I grew up in Kansas and did my undergraduate degree in the US. Aside from industry physics, I'm interested in science policy and every now and then I get nostalgic about soldering circuits and fiddling around with lasers. Outside work I enjoy hiking, reading about history and becoming less incompetent at karate.

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Happy birthday to the laser

Happy birthday to the laser

By Margaret Harris Fifty years ago today, a little-known scientist working in an underfunded lab in California set off a scientific and technological revolution. On 16 May 1960, Theodore Maiman and his assistant Irnee d’Haenens succeeded in coaxing a beam of coherent light out of a flashlamp-pumped crystal of pink ruby. The laser had arrived. […]

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