Abstract

We propose to investigate a laser,¹ which has N identical three-level atoms driven by a coherent pump on one transition, 0 ↔ 2, and coupled to two resonant modes on the other two transitions, 2 ↔ 1 and 1 ↔ 0 (see Fig. 1). For one of these modes, to be called the active one, the resonator should have a high finesse; the second, passive mode may be strongly damped. As long as spontaneous emissions into other, nonresonant modes are negligible, the dynamics of such a laser is fully collective, such that the atoms can be described in terms of global $S_{ij}={\Sigma }_{\mu =1}^N{S}_{{}_{ij}}^{\mu }={\Sigma }_{\mu }|i{〉}_{\mu \mu }〈j|$. Denoting the creation and annihilation operators of photons in the active (passive) mode by a and a⁺ (b and b⁺) we have the interaction Hamiltonian.

© 1994 IEEE