1.
Appl Opt
; 43(12): 2555-60, 2004 Apr 20.
Artigo
em Inglês
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-15119625
RESUMO
Unabsorbed pump light in passively Q-switched microlasers leads to suboptimal pulse generation by bleaching the saturable absorber. This mechanism increases the effective unsaturated transmission of the absorber, which leads to a change in the system dynamics that results in increased pulse durations and decreased pulse energies. We report experimental evidence of pump-induced bleaching of the saturable absorber, an increase in the pulse duration from 360 to 880 ps, and develop a simple analytical treatment that includes this effect within the framework of existing passive Q-switching models.