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Pulse Dynamics In An Actively Mode-Locked Laser, John Geddes, Willie Firth, Kelly Black
Pulse Dynamics In An Actively Mode-Locked Laser, John Geddes, Willie Firth, Kelly Black
John B. Geddes
We consider pulse formation dynamics in an actively mode-locked laser. We show that an amplitude-modulated laser is subject to large transient growth and we demonstrate that at threshold the transient growth is precisely the Petermann excess noise factor for a laser governed by a nonnormal operator. We also demonstrate an exact reduction from the governing PDEs to a low-dimensional system of ODEs for the parameters of an evolving pulse. A linearized version of these equations allows us to find analytical expressions for the transient growth below threshold. We also show that the nonlinear system collapses onto an appropriate fixed point, …