We present a ray transfer matrix for a spiral phase plate. Using this matrix we determine the stability of an optical resonator made of two spiral phase plates and trace stable ray orbits in the resonator. Our results should be relevant to laser physics, optical micromanipulation, quantum information, and optomechanics.

A lasing charactrization of a Brillouin/erbium optical fiber laser (BEFL) is experimentally discussed. In the BEFL, an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) is incorporated into the Brillouin laser resonator to enhance small Brillouin gain, which makes the configuration of the Brillouin laser resonator easy and flexible. The experimental results show that the output power of the BEFL has a thresh...

Multimode laser operation is usually characterized by high output power, yet its beam quality is inferior to that of a laser with single TEM00 mode operation. Here we present an efficient approach for improving the beam quality of multimode laser resonators. The approach is based on splitting the intra-cavity multimode beam into an array of smaller beams, each with a high quality beam distribut...

A complete analysis of the eigenstate of polarization (ESOP’s) in a Brillouin fiber ring laser using fibers with a high circular birefringence is proposed in this paper. Conditions to obtain circular ESOP’s for application in a Brillouin fiber optic current sensor are highlighted as well as conditions to have stable ESOP’s for applications in other passive or active sensors. Measurements are pe...

The saturation process of free-electron-laser oscillators (FEL's) in the warm-beam regime is examined, considering radiation-extraction efficiency and spectral width. The spectral width and conversion efficiency can be estimated in both highand low-gain regimes when the laser-oscillator mode population is sparse enough. Under certain conditions, which can be achieved in a relativistic FEL with ...

A low diffraction beam is obtained by altering the existing resonator of a CO2 laser using a special phase plate. The phase plate is designed based on the boundary diffraction principle and is implemented on the resonator rear mirror. It is found that the low diffraction beam has a smaller M 2 value than that of a Gaussian beam. The effects of the improved beam quality on a laser ablation proce...

We propose an all-optical switch constructed from a two-mode optical resonator containing a strongly coupled, three-state system. The coupling allows a weak laser drive to incoherently control the transmission of a much stronger signal laser into (and through) the resonator. We demonstrate that in this simple setup the presence of a control drive with 1/10 the power of the signal drive can indu...

We demonstrate time-bin entanglement generation in telecom wavelength using a 7 μm radius Si micro-ring resonator pumped by a continuous wave laser. The resonator structure can enhance spontaneous four wave mixing, leading to a photon pair generation rate of about 90-100 Hz with a laser pump power of as low as -3.92 dBm (0.41 mW). We succeed in observing time-bin entanglement with the visibilit...

We show that optical spring damping in an optomechanical resonator can be enhanced by injecting a phase delay in the laser frequency-locking servo to rotate the real and imaginary components of the optical spring constant. This enhances damping at the expense of optical rigidity. We demonstrate enhanced parametric damping which reduces the Q factor of a 0.1-kg-scale resonator from 1.3 105 to 6....