Dynamics of vibro-rotational CO 2 laser transitions in a two-dimensional phase space

Abstract

We describe a procedure for carrying out the adiabatic elimination of the fast variables in a model of a molecular laser that takes into account the interaction among the rotational levels. Our method yields a description of laser dynamics in terms of two essential degrees of freedom as in the usual rate equation limit; the accuracy of our results, however, is far superior to that of the traditional rate equations, as we verify by direct numerical integration of the exact and approximate dynamical systems. We also show that the rotational levels are responsible for the appearance of a purely dissipative term within the framework of the Toda potential description.