Abstract

Laser systems have often revealed instabilities in certain regimes of operation, and identification of the origin of these instabilities has been an important goal for many researchers. The chaotic nature of the intensity fluctuations observed in many systems has been established through careful studies over the past decade. In multimode lasers chaotic fluctuations may arise from undamped relaxation oscillations excited by mode-mode coupling in an intracavity nonlinear medium. An example of this mechanism is provided by the intracavity frequency-doubled Nd: YAG laser, in which a potassium titany1 phosphate (KTP) crystal couples longitudinal laser modes by sum- frequency generation.^1,2

© 1993 Optical Society of America