A Achieving q-switching through cavity stability manipulation

[ppedro]

Does anyone know if there's any q-switching technique that makes use of an unstable resonant cavity (or some kind of switching of the cavity between stable and unstable) to achieve the pulse output?

 

[blue_leaf77]

Does anyone know if there's any q-switching technique that makes use of an unstable resonant cavity (or some kind of switching of the cavity between stable and unstable) to achieve the pulse output?

Maybe the so-called cavity dumping best describes such alternating process.

 

[ppedro]

Maybe the so-called cavity dumping best describes such alternating process.

What do you mean? Cavity dumping doesn't make use of the kind of mechanism that I was wondering about the possibility of existence. I was wondering if it is possible to control the resonant stability of the cavity to somehow reduce or event prevent lasing and then turn it on at some point to produce a pulsed output. Does this, or something similar to this, exist?

 

[blue_leaf77]

I was wondering if it is possible to control the resonant stability of the cavity to somehow reduce or event prevent lasing and then turn it on at some point to produce a pulsed output.

That's how cavity-dumping works. In the first part of each pulse production stage, an acousto-optic modulator (AOM) is switched on so that any light in the cavity is diffracted out of the cavity preventing lasing process. In this step, the cavity can effectively be said to be unstable. Then after sufficient population inversion is reached in the gain medium, the AOM is switched off to allow oscillation inside the cavity and hence extracting all energy previously stored in the gain medium.