Abstract
We present a simple, analytically tractable, generalized aperture model for treating the stripping of a laser beam in a medium with saturable absorption. The model departs from previous treatments in allowing a soft transition from transparency to opacity, which yields a physically realistic diffraction-free amplitude encoding for the laser beam and thereby reduces unphysical fringes in subsequent beam evolution. The model is applied to the problem of cw exactly resonant self-focusing in a vapor of two-state atoms. It is confirmed that for strong beam saturation and absorption that is not too strong, beam propagation can be well modeled as a single stripping–diffraction sequence. A simple interpretation of the on-axis enhancement features is given.
© 1986 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
M. Le Berre, E. Ressayre, A. Tallet, K. Tai, H. M. Gibbs, M. C. Rushford, and N. Peyghambarian
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 1(4) 591-605 (1984)
A. W. McCord, R. J. Ballagh, and J. Cooper
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 5(6) 1323-1334 (1988)
A. W. McCord and R. J. Ballagh
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 7(1) 73-83 (1990)