Quasiperiodic fluctuations and chaos in actively mode-locked gas-discharge ion lasers

Theoretical and experimental studies were made of the laws governing the suppression of active mode locking in an argon ion laser. It was shown experimentally that the loss of active mode locking is attributable to the appearance of pulse satellites that result in regular and chaotic instabilities in the pulse series. The proposed theoretical model enabled us to identify the main factors responsible for the steady-state and unstable multipulsed field structure. These were the coherent nature of the field-medium interaction, the slow and fast relaxation of the population inversion, and the phase relationships between the pulse and the loss modulator.