Abstract

The behavior of a laser intensity as a function of a pump rate is studied. We consider a three- level lasing scheme with two different types of pumping. In the first case, the lower lasing level is depleted to the ground state, and then the pumping is used to excite the atom from the ground state to the upper lasing level. In the second case the pumping is used to excite the atom directly from the lower lasing level to one of the excited states, which is then depleted to the upper lasing level. We refer these two types of pumping to as type 1 and type 2, respectively.

© 1998 Optical Society of America