Abstract

Many applications require large power laser sources with high spectral and spatial mode purity in the cw regime. The injection phase locking technique, borrowed from microwave technology, seems able to solve this problem. In this process, the light emitted by a low power single-mode master oscillator is injected into a large power slave oscillator. When the injected light frequency is in the neighborhood of a frequency resonance of the slave cavity, a large amount of the injected light is stored within it. As a consequence, the slave laser gain saturates. If the saturation is strong enough to bring the gain under oscillation thresh old, the slave laser acts as a regenerative amplifier for the incoming light reaching very large amplification coefficients.

© 1986 Optical Society of America