[Lasers in dentistry 1. What is special about lasers?]

Diagnosis and treatment with lasers is becoming widely spread in dentistry. This article is an introduction to a series of articles that deal with the many dental applications of lasers. The article contains a summary of presently used lasers. It also describes the pertinent features of laser radiation: parallelism of the beam and narrow line shape in the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Finally, it summarizes the relevant processes of interaction of laser radiation with tissue: scattering, absorption, fluorescence and frequency-doubling.