What is a Lamp?

Lamps are light sources that provide radiation mainly through spontaneous emission. This means that the radiation is emitted in all directions and is not coherent. Many lamps tend to emit many wavelengths, but the radiation is hard to collimate into a beam. For many applications, this is not a problem, though. StellarNet offers three types of lamps as light sources: tungsten-halogen, deuterium, and neon lamps. Tungsten-halogen lamps are incandescent sources, meaning they create radiation by heating up a material (tungsten, here). The deuterium and neon lamps are gas discharge lamps. An electrical discharge is used to excite the gas, which then emits radiation.