Abstract

During the last decade, the spatial self-organization in lasers attracted considerable amount of theoretical and experimental investigations. Transverse pattern description in the terms of eigenmodes of empty cavity modes proved to be successful method to interpret spatiotemporal dynamics of the lasers at least up to the moderate Fresnel numbers [1], In the first approximation the dynamics appears to arise from the frequency beating of the transverse modes, but nonlinearity of gain medium may lead to temporal oscillation of the mode intensities or to the occurrence of stationary patterns related to the cooperative frequency locking [2]. In the latter case modes lock to the common frequency with the relative phase, which is selected according to the laser “interests". It was shown theoretically [3] that the stable stationary solution (locked pattern) corresponds to the local minima of generalized free energy of the laser. The relative phase between constituent modes in the locked pattern is also fixed by this minimality requirement. It was shown also experimentally that locking of transverse modes may lead to multiple minima of the free energy and to spatial multistability, which is of particular interest for optical information processing.

© 1996 IEEE