Refined beam expansion method for unstable resonator modes

Abstract

A refined and simplified version of the beam expansion method for computing the modes of unstable resonators is presented here.The principle of the beam expansion method is to express the field pattern on a basis of Hermite-Gaussian functions. Propagating each individual component around the resonator enables a transfer matrix to be constructed from which the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the modes can be determined.Whereas the earlier proof-of-principle approach performed well for low Fresnel numbers, the refined technique gives good results for the challenging test case of magnification M=1.9 and equivalent Fresnel number Neq=49.4. The performance enhancement has been achieved by incorporating a number of adjustments that improve the accuracy of the calculation.