Mazer

The Microwave Assault Zeta class Energy Rectifier or MAZER for short is a specialized direct energy weapons system used mainly by deep space operations WarStars and and heavy assault NovaStars throughout most of the Imperial Defense Fleet.

Basic System Properties
The MAZER is a device operating on similar principles to the laser, but instead amplifies and focuses microwave rather than infrared or visible radiation.

System History
Townes's maser was incapable of continuous output. Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov of the Soviet Union worked independently on the quantum oscillator and solved the problem of continuous output systems by using more than two energy levels and produced the first maser. These systems could release stimulated emission without falling to the ground state, thus maintaining a population inversion. In 1955 Prokhorov and Basov suggested an optical pumping of multilevel system as a method for obtaining the population inversion, which later became one of the main methods of laser pumping.

Townes reports that he encountered opposition from a number of eminent colleagues who thought the maser was theoretically impossible—including Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, Isidor Rabi, Polykarp Kusch, and Llewellyn H. Thomas[1].

Townes, Basov, and Prokhorov shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 "For fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle."

However the practical military functions and properties of the Mazer wouldnt be fully realized until the late 20th Century shortly before the 1st Cylon War when it was discovered that all Centurion models between 0005 or higher were highly vulnerable to a high enough microwave induced energy field (particularly that of Microwaves built between the late 1970s to early 1980s).