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Gas lasers with wave-chaotic resonators

Semiclassical multimode laser theory is extended to gas lasers with open two-dimensional resonators of arbitrary shape. The Doppler frequency shift of the linear-gain coefficient leads to an additional linear coupling between the modes, which, however, is shown to be negligible. The nonlinear laser equations simplify in the special case of wave-chaotic resonators. In the single-mode regime, the intensity of a chaotic laser, as a function of the mode frequency, displays a local minimum at the frequency of the atomic transition. The width of the minimum scales with the inhomogeneous linewidth, in contrast to the Lamb dip in uniaxial resonators whose width is given by the homogeneous linewidth.