We demonstrate that a laser beam converging from a specific transverse mode is a bottle beam, as described in J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 20, 1220 (2003). To our knowledge, this is the first time that a bottle beam has been generated directly from a laser. By calculating the radiation forces on a dielectric Rayleigh sphere in the bottle beam, we show that the single beam can trap high-refractive-index particles at the multiple axial sites of intensity maxima, and it can confine low-index particles on a transverse plane within the bottle regions. Such a novel laser beam may have other applications.

We demonstrate that various optical bottle beams can be directly generated from a tightly focused end-pumped Nd:YVO4 laser. By controlling the size of pump beam and intracavity aperture in a planoconcave cavity, we obtain well contrasting optical bottles with semiconfocal, 1/3-, and 1/5-degenerate cavity configurations. These beams result, respectively, from the superposition of the fundamental mode and the corresponding lowest degenerate transverse eigenmode, which is in-phase at their beam waists. Unlike that of our previous simulation model, this new observation is universal; it is suitable for any kind of gain media in tightly end-pumped lasers.

In this study, we take the pump rate into consideration for the first time to give a theoretical description of radiation trapping in three-level systems. We numerically verify that under strong pumping, the population of the ground state is depleted, which leads to saturation of the radiation trapping within the pumped region. This saturation inevitably clamps the lifetime lengthening that is experimentally verified on a 0.05 at% thin ruby crystal based on the axial pinhole method. Our model is confirmed to be valid in lifetime measurement when the ruby fluorescence is collected from both the pumped and the unpumped regions.

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