Author: Benson, S.V.
Paper Title Page
TUP069 Cavity Length Change vs. Mirror Steering in a Ring Confocal Resonator 516
 
  • S.V. Benson
    JLab, Newport News, Virginia, USA
 
  Funding: Authored by Jefferson Science Associates, LLC under U.S. DOE Contract No. DE-AC05-84-ER40150, the Office of Naval Research, and the Joint Technology Office.
In principle, a ring confocal resonator allows for the use of a short Rayleigh length without the extreme sensi-tivity to mirror steering typical in a near-concentric reso-nator [1]. One possible weakness of such a resonator is that the cavity length is no longer independent of the mirror steering. This is one of the strengths of a linear resonator. In this presentation, it is shown that, in a simple 2-dimensional corner cube type ring confocal resonator, the cavity length is, in fact, not dependent on the mirror steering to first order in the mirror angles. Thus the ring-confocal resonator might be a very easy-to-operate and stable resonator for short Rayleigh range operation in FEL oscillators
[1] Stephen Benson, George Neil, Michelle Shinn, Laser and Beam Control Technologies, Santanu Basu, James Riker, Editors, Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 4632 (2002).