General Dynamics of Single Frequency Solid-State Lasers in the Saturated Regime

A general analysis of the dynamics of a single frequency laser in the saturated regime subject to spatial hole burning is undertaken. It is shown that the response of the laser to perturbations about the steady state can be decomposed into the sum of a low dimensional oscillatory component and a non-oscillating residual component which decays according to a time scale comparable to the lifetime of the (pumped) gain medium. The infinite dimensional residual component has interesting physical implications under conditions of strong saturation, including suppression - and even elimination - of the relaxation oscillation peak. The results are applied to derive new expressions for spontaneous emission noise spectra in solid-state lasers. This paper extends and generalizes earlier work on the dynamics of distributed feedback fiber lasers. Temperature dependent effects are not considered.