Lasing without inversion in dressed-state lasers

Abstract

We study the operational properties of the lasing field generated from strongly driven two-level atoms in a ring cavity by including the field saturation to all orders. Lasing without inversion between bare atomic states can occur for both off-resonant– and resonant-pump fields. In the case of an off-resonant–pump field, lasing occurs at one of the Rabi sidebands, for which there exists population inversion between the relevant dressed-atom–field states. In the case of a resonant-pump field, lasing can occur near either of two Rabi sidebands, for which there is no population inversion between the dressed states; here the gain is due to the atomic coherence between the dressed states. While the operation of the off-resonantly–pumped dressed-state laser is similar to that of an ordinary laser, the operation of the resonantly pumped dressed-state laser exhibits some interesting features, such as (1) mode pushing and (2) larger laser intensity coming from smaller linear gain as the detuning is changed. In order to show such features, the calculations have to go beyond the secular approximation.