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1) Is it possible to create a laser from focused sun light by separating and using only one wavelength of light as a laser and using the proper mechanism to polarize it and make it coherent?

2) If so, would it be possible to use some type of a wavelength filter enabling it to focus different wavelengths for different applications?

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  • $\begingroup$ Since photons from the sun are not coherent, there is no mechanism to turn some slice of the spectrum into a laser. At the worst, use a solar panel to power a laser, although you might think that is cheating... Splitting the spectrum requires only a prism. $\endgroup$
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Apr 6, 2018 at 1:49
  • $\begingroup$ There is no obvious reason why some components of sunlight couldn't be used to pump a laser (i.e., to achieve a population inversion). $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 6, 2018 at 11:09
  • $\begingroup$ You may be interested in "How many principles does it take to change a light bulb . . . into a laser?": arxiv.org/pdf/1510.04805.pdf $\endgroup$
    – Jagerber48
    Commented Jan 19, 2020 at 6:09

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If you're asking about the possibility of making coherent light by filtering incoherent, broad-spectrum sunlight, the answer is "no". You could filter the light down to a very narrow wavelength band by throwing away all the other wavelengths, and end up with nearly monochromatic light. That leaves about 1/10000 of the original light power. Now, to obtain spatial coherence (which allows a laser to be focused to a small spot), you would need to put a tiny pinhole (a micron or two wide) at the focus of the filtered sunlight. Try focusing sunlight and you'll find that it is difficult to get a spot smaller than about a millimeter. So the pinhole throws away at least 99.999 % of the monochromatic light. Now you've got only 1/10,000,000,000 of the light you started with -- and it's still not as coherent as a laser.

On the other hand, if the objective is simply to get highly monochromatic light for experiments such as testing spectral response of photosynthesis or light sensors, all you would need is a prism or diffraction grating, a slit filter, and a lens.

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Even with perfect filtering (answer of S. McGrew), one can still distinguish filtered sunlight from true laser light by using the 2nd-order autocorrelation function $g^2(τ)$.

For a laser: $g^2(0) = 1$.

For thermal light (e.g. sunlight): $g^2(0) = 2$

In words: While the temporal arrival time of laser photons is randomly distributed (poissonian distribution), thermal photons arrive in small bunches (Bose-Einstein distribution). This can be measured with a Hanbury-Brown-Twiss experiment.

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