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A mechanism for operation bistability of passive mode-locked lasers is discovered. It explains why self-starting requires a critical minimum strength of seed fluctuations. There are two contributing factors: (a) a small-scale structure of the spectral loss curve due to a parasitic frequency-dependent loss, (b) phase modulation of the resulting pulses due to nonlinearity and frequency dispersion of the refractive index of intracavity elements. We discuss applications to actual experimental systems.
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Komarov et al. (2002) studied this question.
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