Feature

Diffractive Optic Laser Resonator

J. R. Leger, D. Chen, G. Mowry, Z. Wang, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn.

Virtually all commercial lasers use spherical or planar mirrors to establish the laser mode. However, resonators with spherical mirrors represent only a very small subset of possible resonator configurations. Recently, the technology of diffractive optics has made it possible to fabricate high-quality mirrors with arbitrary phase reflectance, giving rise to an entirely new class of laser resonators. These new resonators can have unique and highly desirable properties such as user-designable mode shapes and profiles, high modal discrimination without a correspondingly high fundamental mode loss, and large mode volumes in short cavities.