Abstract
The avalanche mechanism has been shown to be an effective way to pump several upconversion lasers.1-3 The effect can be described as follows: Initial weak excitation via a non-resonant ground state absorption induces a small population in a metastable intermediate level. Subsequent resonant excitation out of this level populates the upper laser level. What distinguishes the avalanche mechanism from a simple two- step absorption is a cross-relaxation path which provides an additional channel for populating the intermediate level, thus leading to increased excited state absorption. In ref. 2, the avalanche process was studied by fitting data from YLF:Nd3+ to a 3-level model. The present work extends that approach to Tm3+-doped crystals.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Ki-Soo Lim, Yoo-Mi Oh, Soo-Cheon Lee, and Arao Nakamura
CWF32 The European Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO/Europe) 1998
W. E. Case, A. W. Kueny, and M. E. Koch
MJ8 OSA Annual Meeting (FIO) 1992
Yuan Shi, Ove Poulsen, and Harold K. Haugen
CMA5 The European Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO/Europe) 1994