Abstract
Bad cavity lasers are experiencing renewed interest in the context of active optical frequency standards, due to their enhanced robustness against fluctuations of the laser cavity. The gain medium would consist of narrow-linewidth atoms, either trapped inside the cavity or intersecting the cavity mode dynamically. A series of effects like the atoms finite velocity distribution, atomic interactions, or interactions of realistic multilevel atoms with auxiliary or stray fields can lead to an inhomogeneous broadening of the atomic gain profile. This causes the emergence of unstable regimes of laser operation, characterized by complex temporal patterns of the field amplitude. We study the steady-state solutions and their stability for the metrology-relevant case of a bad cavity laser with spin-1/2 atoms, such as $^{171}\mathrm{Yb}$, interacting with an external magnetic field. For the stability analysis, we present an efficient method, which can be applied to a broad class of single-mode bad cavity lasers with inhomogeneously broadened multilevel atoms acting as a gain medium.
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