Stability of a laser cavity with non-parabolic phase transformation elements

Abstract

In this paper we present a general approach to determine the stability of a laser cavity which can include non-conventional phase transformation elements. We consider two pertinent examples of the detailed investigation of the stability of a laser cavity firstly with a lens with spherical aberration and thereafter a lens axicon doublet to illustrate the implementation of the given approach. In the particular case of the intra-cavity elements having parabolic surfaces, the approach comes to the well-known stability condition for conventional laser resonators namely 0 ≤(1-z/R1) (1-z/R2) ≤1.