Preface 5 Chapter 1. Population Inversion in Active Media 9 Some General Aspects 9 Optical Pumping. Solid-state Lasers Organic Dye Lasers 30 Gas Lasers with a Wideband Optical Pumping 36 Pumping by Self-maintained Electric Discharge in Rarefied Gases 39 Eleciro-ionisation Lasers 50 Gasdynamic Lasers (Thermal Pumping) 54 Chemical Lasers 58 Plasma Lasers (Recombination Pumping) 64 Chapter 2. Formation of Radiation Field in a Laser Resonator ... 73 2.1. Generation Condition 73 Optical Resonator and Laser Radiation (Preliminary Remarks) 78 General Remarks about Open Resonators . 88 Lens Waveguides and Open Resonators (Geometrical Optics Approximation) . 100 Detuning of an Open Resonator 112 Analysis of Open Resonators on the Basis of Fox-Li Iterative Method. Equivalent Resonators 116 Gaussian Beams 134 Transformation and Matching of Gaussian Beams 142 Gaussian Beams in Stable Resonators 151 Unstable Resonators 163 Frequency Selection 175 Hole-burning Effect and Frequency Pulling Effect 183 Thermal Lens 190 Waveguide Resonators 195 Optical Radiation in a Thin-film Waveguide. Distributed Feedback 200 Chapter 3. Dynamics of Laser Processes 214 General Remarks about Laser Operating Conditions .... 215 Approximate Equations Describing the Dynamics of Laser Processes (Balance Equations) 229 Free Generation. Regular Damped Pulsations of Radiation Power 244 Unstable Resonator Laser. Undamped Pulsations of Radiation Power 256 Active Modulation of the Resonator Ç-factor 262 Giant Pulse Generation in the Case of Active Modulation of the Resonator 270 Bleachable Filter Lasers 283 Giant Pulse Generation for Passive ^-modulation of the Resonator 296 3.9 Longitudinal Mode Locking (Ultrashort Light Pulse Generation) 304 Measurement of Duration of Ultrashort Light Pulses .... 313 Analysis of Self-locking of Longitudinal Modes in a Bleachable Filter Laser Based on Fluctuation Concepts 319 Time-based Description of Active Longitudinal Mode Locking in a Laser with a Uniformly. Broadened Gain Line . . . . . 328 Appendices 336 References 345 Index 354 |