ABSTRACT
An arrangement based on a degenerate cavity laser for forming an array of nonlinearly coupled lasers with an intracavity saturable absorber is presented. More than 30 lasers were spatially phase locked and temporally Q switched. The arrangement with nonlinear coupling was found to be 25 times more sensitive to loss differences and converged five times faster to the lowest loss phase locked state than with linear coupling, thus providing a unique solution to problems that have several near-degenerate solutions.
ABSTRACT
Two approaches for generating flat-top beams (uniform intensity profile) with extended depth of focus are presented. One involves two diffractive optical elements (DOEs) and the other only a single DOE. The results indicate that the depth of focus of such beams strongly depends on the phase distribution at the output of the DOEs. By having uniform phase distribution, it is possible to generate flat-top beams with extended depth of focus.
ABSTRACT
Novel multi-tasking geometric phase metasurfaces were incorporated into a modified degenerate cavity laser as an output coupler to efficiently generate spin-dependent twisted light beams of different topologies. Multiple harmonic scalar vortex laser beams were formed by replacing the laser output coupler with a shared-aperture metasurface. A variety of distinct wave functions were obtained with an interleaving approach - random interspersing of geometric phase profiles within shared-aperture metasurfaces. Utilizing the interleaved metasurfaces, we generated vectorial vortices by coherently superposing of scalar vortices with opposite topological charges and spin states. We also generated multiple partially coherent vortices by incorporating harmonic response metasurfaces. The incorporation of the metasurface platforms into a laser cavity opens a pathway to novel types of nanophotonic functionalities and enhanced light-matter interactions, offering exciting new opportunities for light manipulation.
ABSTRACT
Topological defects have been observed and studied in a wide range of systems, such as cosmology, spin systems, cold atoms, and optics, as they are quenched across a phase transition into an ordered state. These defects limit the coherence of the system and its ability to approach a fully ordered state, so revealing their origin and control is becoming an increasingly important field of research. We observe dissipative topological defects in a one-dimensional ring of phased-locked lasers, and show how their formation is related to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism and is governed in a universal manner by two competing time scales. The ratio between these two time scales depends on the system parameters, and thus offers the possibility of enabling the system to dissipate to a fully ordered, defect-free state that can be exploited for solving hard computational problems in various fields.
ABSTRACT
An efficient method for controlling the spatial coherence has previously been demonstrated in a modified degenerate cavity laser. There, the degree of spatial coherence was controlled by changing the size of a circular aperture mask placed inside the cavity. In this paper, we extend the method and perform general manipulation of the spatial coherence properties of the laser, by resorting to more sophisticated intra-cavity masks. As predicted from the Van Cittert Zernike theorem, the spatial coherence is shown to depend on the geometry of the masks. This is demonstrated with different mask geometries: a variable slit which enables independent control of spatial coherence properties in one coordinate axis without affecting those in the other; a double aperture, an annular ring and a circular aperture array which generate spatial coherence functional forms of cosine, Bessel and comb, respectively.
