PUMP-COUPLED MASERS - TRANSIENT REGIME

We consider a system of two masers that are pumped by the same beam of excited atoms. The atoms pass first through one maser and then through the other. As a result, the first maser modifies the pump going into the second and an effective coupling results. We examine this system in the amplifier configuration, i.e., we do not consider saturation effects. The fields in the two masers are mutually coherent and can, under the proper circumstances, be free of noise in their relative phase. Therefore this system exhibits behavior similar to that of a correlated-emission laser. We also find that the photon number in the second maser grows faster than that in the first. These effects should be observable even if the pump beam has a finite velocity spread.