ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with electric discharge pumped far-infrared lasers. The discovery of the H2O and the HCN laser by Gebbie et al [8,13,14] opened up a new age of spectroscopy in the far-infrared, a spectral range which had been notoriously hampered by the low power of thermal radiation sources. Many laboratories took up research on glow discharge excited molecular lasers and suddenly a substantial number of fairly strong laser lines in the far-infrared were available. Many measurements of fundamental importance could be carried out in various fields. In particular in solid state physics a new technique, magneto-spectroscopy, evolved which made use of fixed frequency laser lines, tuning the energy levels of the object of investigation by an external magnetic field. For instance, after its feasibility was first demonstrated [5], most effective masses and band parameters of semiconductors were determined by this method [27, 28].
