Experimental analysis of the effects of orientation and location of the Pockels cell in an Nd:YAG laser resonator

We report an experimental study on the effects of the orientation and location of a Pockels cell used as electro-optic Q-switch in a laser resonator. Out of the four resonator configurations studied, it was found that in two resonator configurations a high cavity-Q value of the resonator was maintained in Q-switched operation, irrespective of the orientation of the crystallographic axis of the Pockels cell with respect to the incident plane of polarization. Further, analysis of the polarization state of the output in one of the configurations showed that it is always linearly polarized in the plane of the pass axis of the intra-cavity polarizer. In the other configuration it was observed that, as the Pockels cell was rotated, the plane of the linearly polarized output light was rotated correspondingly. For all of the resonator configurations, our experimental results are in good agreement with a Jones matrix analysis