Stimulated Brillouin scattering and dynamical instabilities in a multimode cw dye laser.

Abstract

Stimulated Brillouin scattering in the dye jet inside a linear laser cavity has been investigated and found to be of significant importance for the dynamical behavior of multimode cw dye lasers. At high spectral power densities, it is responsible for a strong coupling of thousands of individual modes into a few mode packets, thus drastically reducing the number of actually existing degrees of freedom of the system. For a decreasing spectral power density, the mode-coupling strength due to stimulated Brillouin scattering lowers, accompanied by an increase of the number of mode packets. At low spectral power densities, additional mode-coupling mechanisms are supposed to account for a stepwise reduction of the number of independently oscillating mode packets. As an interesting application, the spectroscopic technique of intracavity optical-optical double resonance is discussed and demonstrated.