Bidirectional operation and gyroscopic properties of passively mode-locked Nd:YVO4 ring laser

✍ Scribed by Y. Liu; L. Sun; H. Qiu; Y. Wang; Q. Tian; X. Ma

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 209 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1612-2011
• DOI: 10.1002/lapl.200610079

✦ Synopsis

A simple LD-end-pumped, passively mode-locked
Nd:YVO~4~ ring laser with bidirectional outputs was demonstrated,
and the gyroscopic properties of the ring laser was studied. The
laser was continuous wave mode-locked by use of a semiconductor
saturable absorber mirror (SESAM), and both clockwise and
counter-clockwise outputs are stable laser pulse trains with pulse
duration of 64 ps. The continuous wave mode-locking was obtained
under pump power as low as 540 mW. The average output power is
50 mW for the counter-clockwise laser and 52mW for the clockwise
laser under pump power of 1378 mW. The whole slope efficiency of
the ring laser is about 9.4%. The two output pulse trains of the
ring laser were combined to study its gyroscopic properties. The
beat frequency of the pulsed solid-state laser gyro versus the
rotation rates follows the Sagnac formula. The laser gyro has a
large dead band of 6-8 dec/s, which was believed to be caused by
the long pulse duration and the colliding of the opposite pulses
on the SESAM.