Siegman’s elegant laser resonator modes

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In the seminal paper on elegant Gaussian beams, Siegman introduced them as a complex-argument variant of standard Gaussian beams and proved that they cannot be eigenmodes of spherical resonators. In this work, we demonstrate that this intrinsic asymmetry can be overcome by judiciously superposing a finite number of elegant Laguerre–Gauss beams, all of them having the same amount of orbital angular momentum. In other words, we found a new family of elegant modes that are eigenmodes of confocal resonators and will call them Siegman’s elegant resonator modes.