Investigation of the beam propagation in a pumped laser rod

A method investigating the beam propagation in a pumped laser rod is proposed. In this method, the pumped laser rod in a resonator is evenly divided into N segments along the laser rod axis, and each segment is considered as a small thermal lens with thermal focus length of f. Accordingly, the beam radius distributions in the laser rod for the symmetric and asymmetric resonators are thus calculated, respectively. The beam radius distribution in the whole resonator is also calculated. Moreover, the calculated beam distribution in the whole resonator and in the rod is also described in detail.