The study and application of multi-reentrant two-spherical-mirror ring lasers

• Main Authors: Pi-Ling Huang, 黃碧鈴
• Other Authors: Sheng-Lung Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/40362970350096610042

博士 === 國立中山大學 === 光電工程研究所 === 91 === A novel non-planar and multi-reentrant two-spherical-mirror ring cavity is demonstrated. It is compact and free of astigmatism compare to the commercial ring cavity systems. The multi-reentrant condition of the ring cavity is derived and the stability of the laser cavity is analyzed. The study of polarization evolution in this kind of ring cavity is also presented. Unidirectional operation is achieved by use of reciprocal and nonreciprocal polarization rotators to differentiate the round-trip loss. The multi-reentrant ring cavity has been utilized in single frequency laser and passively Q-switched laser. Single frequency laser possesses the advantages of high coherence and low noise, which can be used to the applications such as precision measurement. In the methods of single frequency generation, ring cavity configuration was shown to be the most robust one. Using this ring cavity, an IR and its intra-cavity frequency doubled green laser were demonstrated which the amplitude noise is lower than 0.3%. Passively Q-switched laser is an efficient and compact way to generate high-peak-power laser pulses because high voltages and fast driving electronics are not required. Its high power is useful for diverse applications including nonlinear optical processes, micromachining, material processing and range finders. But the major drawback of a passively Q-switched laser is its inherent large timing jitter, which is mainly originated from the photo dynamics in the cavity, environmental instabilities and spontaneous noise from the gain medium. In our study, we demonstrated the operation of a low-jitter, passively Q-switched laser by using the reentrant two-mirror unidirectional ring cavity, which generates a pulse width of 63ns, peak power of 250 W laser output. Due to the elimination of spontaneous noise and spatial hole burning effects, the timing jitter can be maintained below 3% over a wide range of pump powers with integrations of over 52,000 pulses.