Numerical study on the selective excitation of Helmholtz–Gauss beams in end-pumped solid-state digital lasers with the control of the laser gain transverse position provided by off-axis end pumping

Abstract

This study proposes a complete and unified method for selective excitation of any specified nearly nondiffracting Helmholtz–Gauss (HzG) beam in end-pumped solid-state digital lasers. Four types of the HzG beams: cosine-Gauss beams, Bessel–Gauss beams, Mathieu–Gauss beams, and, in particular, parabolic-Gauss beams are successfully demonstrated to be generated with the proposed methods. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, parabolic-Gauss beams have not yet been directly generated from any kind of laser system. The numerical results of this study show that one can successfully achieve any lasing HzG beams directly from the solid-state digital lasers with only added control of the laser gain transverse position provided by off-axis end pumping. This study also presents a practical digital laser set-up for easily manipulating off-axis pumping in order to achieve the control of the laser gain transverse gain position in digital lasers. The reported results in this study provide advancement of digital lasers in dynamically generating nondiffracting beams. The control of the digital laser cavity gain position creates the possibility of achieving real-time selection of more laser modes in digital lasers, and it is worth further investigation in the future.