Section 9

By Adrienne Llewellyn. 2019

Exercise: Since the mirror at the end of an optical resonator has a finite diameter, some part of the incident beam diffracts beyond the edge of the mirror and is lost. This represents a loss in the resonator that must be compensated by the gain in the laser medium. A rough approximation to the loss can be computed in the following way. (a) Compute the intensity distribution of a zero-order Gauss-Laguerre mode and show that for a mirror of diameter 2 D a = the fractional energy loss for a mode with radius w is