Steady-state ab initio theory of lasers with injected signals

We present an ab initio treatment of the steady-state of lasers with injected signals that describes a regime, valid for microlasers, in which the locking transition is dominated by cross saturation and spatial hole burning. The theory goes beyond standard approaches and treats multimode lasing with injected signals and finds the possibility of partially locked states and as well as repulsion of the free-running frequencies from the injected signal. The theory agrees well with exact integration of the full wave and matter equations for the system. It can also describe accurately complex modern lasers structures and is applied to the example of deformed disk lasers. We show that in the case of a one-dimensional cavity in the locked or regenerative amplifier regime the theory reduces to an improved version of the Adler equations in the appropriate limit. © 2014 American Physical Society.