Elegant Cartesian Laguerre-Hermite-Gaussian laser cavity modes.

Abstract

In this work, we present a new family of modes of confocal resonators eigenfunctions of the Fraunhofer diffraction integral, the elegant Cartesian Laguerre-Hermite-Gaussian modes. We show that these modes can be single-pass or round-trip eigenmodes of the resonator depending on the focal distance of the mirrors and their separation. We study their properties and compare them to the well known normal and elegant Hermite and Laguerre-Gauss modes of laser resonators. The new family of modes are not structurally stable on propagation as normal Gaussian modes nor present a monotonic intensity evolution as the normal and elegant Gaussian modes. We also demonstrate that on propagation, they present the self-healing property.