Simulation and Analysis of Transverse Modes by the Transfer Matrix Method in a Circular Confocal Resonator

A confocal resonator is a special instance of general stable resonators. Amplitude distributions,losses and beam radii of self-reproducing modes in a confocal resonator are used to analyze general stable resonators due to their equivalence. In order to analyze a circular confocal resonator with a big Fresnel number,in this paper,we introduce a transfer matrix method to calculate and analyze the modes in a confocal resonator. It was found that the results from the transfer matrix method are in good agreement with those resulted from the integral iterative method proposed by Fox and Li and the transfer matrix method is suitable to the confocal resonator with a big Fresnel number.