Manifestation of active medium astigmatism at transverse mode locking in a diode end-pumped stable resonator laser

摘要

Transverse mode locking in a diode end-pumped Nd:YAG laser with up to approx140 cm resonator length was investigated. It was found that for each resonator degeneracy, there are two degenerate lengths where the fundamental mode is very different from the Gaussian mode. Fundamental mode intensity patterns for these lengths expand in directions perpendicular to each other. Experimental results are in a good agreement with numerical calculations, taking into account active medium (AM) astigmatism and inhomogeneous gain. Optical powers of astigmatic AM can be found directly from measurements of degenerate lengths without using numerical modeling.