Simple method of optical ring cavity design and its applications

When an optical ring cavity is designed, the beam radii at some special positions, especially at the beam waists are very interested in, since the gain mediums, nonlinear crystals and others important optical elements are generally located at the beam waist. In this paper, we firstly presented a simple method for designing optical ring cavities based on the self-consistency theory and the fact that q parameter is uniquely determined by the waist beam radius and its position. This approach is different from ABCD method and it no longer requires cumbersome calculation. The calculations of designing optical ring cavities are simplified because q parameter only has imaginary part at beam waist plane. Moreover, designing the resonant cavity through the calculation of beam waist radii and their position has great practical significance, because it is very easy to adjust the waist radii and the positions at the important optical elements. We employed this method to design an end-pumped six-mirror ring cavity continuous-wave passively mode locked laser. The experiment of a highly stabilized continuous-wave mode locked (CWML) laser was investigated and the results coincided with the theoretical studies very well. The investigation results show that the simple method can be used to design optical ring cavities conveniently, intuitively and efficiently.