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Who first observed stimulated emission in 1928?

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The German physicist Rudolf Walther Ladenburg was the first to observe stimulated emission in 1928.1

While Albert Einstein had theoretically proposed the existence of stimulated emission in 1916 and 1917 through his work on the quantum theory of light, it was Ladenburg who experimentally confirmed the phenomenon, though it was initially considered to have no practical application at the time. This process later became the fundamental principle behind the invention of the laser.213