Abstract

The observation of an instability that is intrinsic to all lasers operating far above threshold was recently reported by Hillman et al.¹ The instability arises from the presence of strong parametric gain at frequencies separated from the initial mode by the Rabi frequency. The effect of the instability is to cause the laser to pass through a series of thresholds at which there are sudden jumps in the output power that are accompanied by discontinuous changes in the spectrum of the laser field. We review these observations and report new theoretical and experimental results.

© 1984 Optical Society of America