Saturation effects and lamb-dip formation in molecular lasers

With the use of velocity-dependent kinetic equations to account properly for collisional relaxation behavior in molecular lasers, new results for gain saturation formulas have been obtained for intermediate values of pressure. These results, for a traveling-wave field, are exact and, in proper limits, reduce to known results. Further, a more complete description of the behavior of the Lamb dip as a function of molecular parameters has been obtained, and it is shown how the Lamb dip depends not only upon molecular parameters, but upon the total cavity loss parameter itself.