Abstract

We have used injection locking to force a 5-W lamp-pumped cw Nd:YAG ring laser at 1.064 µm to run in a single axial mode and with essentially the same spectral quality as the 40-mW diode laser-pumped Nd:YAG master oscillator.¹ The Pound-Drever rf sideband technique was used to servo control the slave laser cavity length to maintain the injection locking condition. The locking range was measured as a function of master/slave power ratio and was in good agreement with theory. To protect the master oscillator the slave laser was forced to run in a single direction with an intracavity Faraday rotator, although unidirectional operation of the slave laser could be obtained by injection locking. We measured the rms phase noise of the locked system compared to the master laser to be 0.3 rad in a 10-kHz bandwidth.

© 1989 Optical Society of America