Intracavity second-harmonic generation: The steady-state solutions

Abstract

We study the steady states of a solid-state laser containing a birefringent frequency-doubling crystal such as a YAG-KTP laser and assess their stability in a systematic way. We show that as the pump power is increased, different scenarios arise: Hopf bifurcation to antiphased periodic regimes, mode hopping between different cw states, and finally breakup of the multimode states for a single- or two-mode cw regime involving homoclinic points.