Chaotic regimes and stability of peak output radiation power of a YAG:Nd3+ laser with resonator loss modulation

It was found that one of the reasons for the instability of the peak output power of a YAG:Nd³⁺ laser generating giant pulses is the dynamic properties of this laser behaving as a spontaneously oscillating system with an inertial nonlinearity. A numerical method was used to find the frequency intervals of parametric effects on losses in the laser resonator in which random oscillations were observed. The calculations agreed with experimental results. It was established that the transition to chaos occurred via intermittency. A small scatter of the peak power (less than 1%) was observed only within narrow frequency intervals depending on the parameters of the system particularly on the off-duty factor of a modulating pulse train.