Abstract

During the recent years, many efforts have been devoted, in our laboratory as in others (1), to the study of the excited-state-absorption (ESA) processes and to direct measurements of the ESA cross-sections in the pumping as well as in the emission wavelength domains in the solid-state laser materials based on the transition metal ions (T. M. I.)-These works have proved that ESA is a very important source of loss in these laser systems and that it must be studied specifically and systematically because it is often hardly predictable from simple absorption and emission data.

© 1991 Optical Society of America