Supernarrow saturated absorption resonances in weakly coupled two resonant optical cavities

The advantages of the weakly coupled two resonant optical cavities (hereinafter referred to as three-mirror cavity) used for observation of the supernarrow saturated absorption resonances are shown. Among these advantages we can name: (a) the possibility to control the intensity in the cavity with the inside absorbing cell which is important when the gain and absorption saturation parameters differ significantly; (b) the resonances observation from the ‘passive’ side of the three-mirror cavity permits us to decrease drastically the influence of the reflected signal from the detector; (c) if instead of the absorbing cell an active system is put in (gain plus absorption), it is possible by tuning the operating mode of the active interferometer to obtain many-fold gain of the supernarrow resonance amplitude. Received: 11 January 2000 / Revised version: 20 June 2000 / Published online: 9 February 2001