Abstract

Recent work is presented on 3-D saturable gain-gratings, optically-written by spatial hole-burning in the active lasing medium, as efficient self-adaptive diffractive optical elements [1] for application in gain media phase conjugators [2] and for adaptive spatial, spectral and Q-switching control of high-gain solid-state lasers [3,4,5,6], Description will be made of gain-gratings written by spatial hole-burning when coherent beams, at the lasing wavelength, interfere in a gain medium. Such 3-D gain gratings, which have a persistence for the upper-state lifetime of the gain medium, can be considered as volume gain holograms and the application of these adaptive grating devices can be considered as a type of dynamic "gain holography".

© 1996 IEEE