摘要 : Lasers have progressed a long way from a point where they were famously regarded as a solution looking for a problem to the present day wherein there is nearly no field that has been left untouched by these exotic devices. They fi... 展开 Lasers have progressed a long way from a point where they were famously regarded as a solution looking for a problem to the present day wherein there is nearly no field that has been left untouched by these exotic devices. They find wide-ranging applications from industry, medicine, and applied science to high-end defense systems. The focus of the present review paper is to examine potential lasers from point of view of directed energy applications. This entails developing scalable lasers with power levels of multi-ten kilowatts to several hundred kilowatts, high beam quality, and high efficiency with significant ease of operation. The plausible lasers and their selected configurations must effectively resolve medium scaling issues in terms of performance and nonlinearity phenomena, mitigate losses associated with pumping of laser media, diminish thermal management requirements together with achieving ease of handling, and address aspects pertaining to environmental compatibility. Thus, the realization of a compact and light-weight laser module with near-diffraction limited laser beam quality, and better atmospheric propagation providing high lethality onto the object target needs to be ensured. There has been a series of competing lasers across different phases viz., gas, liquid, and solid which have been thoroughly investigated theoretically and experimentally. In this context, there are chemical lasers and alkali vapor lasers which utilize laser media in gaseous phase, liquid phase media in dye lasers and rare earth doped aprotic inorganic liquid lasers, solid-state lasers and fiber lasers employing laser media in the solid phase. However, the search for an ideal laser with all the enlisted coveted features is far from over. Hence, researchers across the world are in continuous pursuit of a near-ideal laser from a directed energy perspective. The article reviews different contemporary high power lasers developed elaborating on their scientific and technological perspective, along with the underlying challenges, operational constraints, and futuristic realization methodologies. 收起