World’s first room-temperature, high-energy maser

Nature : Passing microwaves through a laser-excited crystal of organic molecules amplifies the microwave signal coherently. The result is a microwave laser—a maser—that is almost 100 million times as powerful as any previously created on Earth. Despite being both theorized and built before lasers, masers were limited in their applications by their low power and by the necessity of super-cold temperatures. Inspired by a decade-old Japanese paper, Mark Oxborrow of the UK National Physical Laboratory in Teddington and his colleagues created the maser using pentacene that they borrowed from another lab and an old medical laser they found on eBay.