Saturation of radiation trapping and lifetime measurements in three-level laser crystals.

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.