Abstract
Tm: lasers suffer from self-pulsing. A four-level rate equation analysis suggested that the self-pulsing could be due to excited-state absorption. We report a measurement of the cross section for this absorption and show that it is too small to be the sole cause of the self-pulsing. We propose nonlinear dynamical chaos as an alternative explanation and present a chaos analysis of the output of a cw-pumped Tm: laser, including experimental evidence of chaos.
3 More- Received 29 July 2014
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.91.043819
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