Synchronously pumped femtosecond optical parametric oscillator of congruent and stoichiometric MgO-doped periodically poled lithium niobate

A synchronously pumped femtosecond optical parametric oscillator based on congruent MgO-doped periodically poled lithium niobate (c-MgO:PPLN) is reported. The system, operating at room temperature, was pumped by a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser. The wavelengths of the signal and idler waves were tuned from 870 nm to 1.54 μm and 1.58 to 5.67 μm, respectively, by changing the pump wavelength, the grating period or the cavity length. Pumped by 1.1 W of 755 nm laser radiation, the OPO generated 310 mW of 1080 nm radiation. This signal output corresponds to a total conversion efficiency of 50%. Without dispersion compensation the OPO generated phase-modulated signal pulses of 200 fs duration. Besides the OPO of c-MgO:PPLN, an OPO of stoichiometric (s) MgO:PPLN was investigated. Because of the reduced sensitivity to photorefractive damage, both crystals allowed efficient OPO operation at room temperature. Received: 19 August 2002 / Revised version: 11 December 2002 / Published online: 19 March 2003 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author. Fax: +49-631/205-3906, E-mail: andres@physik.uni-kl.de     

Widely tunable femtosecond fiber optical parametric oscillator

The phase-matching condition in a fiber is discussed. A balance among the different orders of fiber dispersion can be found to achieve a widely tuning modulation instability gain for pumping around the normal dispersion regime. Three coupled nonlinear wave equations are used to simulate the femtosecond fiber optical parametric oscillator. The numerical results show that, through appropriate choice of dispersion, femtosecond pulses with a 180-nm tunable range can be generated when pump wavelength near a fiber’s zero-dispersion wavelength is tuned only 7 nm. Further tuning is limited by the walk-off between the pump and the signal pulses.     

A 9.5-W 82-MHz-repetition-rate picosecond optical parametric generator with cw diode laser injection seeding

We report on an injection-seeded 9.5-W 82-MHz-repetition-rate picosecond optical parametric generator (OPG) based on a 55 mm long crystal of periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) with a quasi-phase-matching (QPM) grating period of 29.75 μm. The OPG is excited by a continuously diode pumped mode-locked picosecond Nd:YVO₄ oscillator-amplifier system. The laser system generates 7 ps pulses with a repetition rate of 82.3 MHz and an average power of 24 W. Without injection-seeding the total average output power of the OPG is 8.9 W, which corresponds to an internal conversion efficiency of 50%. The wavelengths of the signal and idler waves were tuned in the range 1.57–1.64 μm and 3.03–3.3 μm, respectively, by changing the crystal temperature from 150 °C to 250 °C. Injection seeding of the OPG at 1.58 μm with 4 mW of single frequency continuous-wave radiation of a distributed-feedback (DFB) diode laser increases the OPG output to 9.5 W (53% conversion efficiency). The injection seeding increases the pulse duration and reduces the spectral bandwidth. When pumped by 10 W of 1.06 μm laser radiation, the duration of the signal pulses increased from 3.6 ps to 5.5 ps while the spectral bandwidth is reduced from 4.5 nm to 0.85 nm. Seeding thus improved the time-bandwidth product from 1.98 to a value of 0.56, much closer to the Fourier limit. Received: 29 April 2002 / Published online: 8 August 2002     

Characteristics of a cw monolithic optical parametric oscillator

4 as a nonlinear crystal and obtained a pump threshold of 7 mW and an output power of 6 mW for a pump power of 40 mW. The OPO operated in a single longitudinal mode pair of a signal and an idler, over 1 h without mode hopping in the free-running condition. The signal and the idler wavelengths were tunable by 1 nm by changing the crystal temperature by 20 °C. The continuous tuning of the beat frequency between the signal and the idler was achieved by temperature tuning (slow control, 80 MHz/K) and E-field tuning (fast control, 0.75 MHz/V). We demonstrated the feasibility of frequency control by phase locking the beat frequency. The beat frequency could be successfully phase locked to a signal generated by a synthesizer through the electrooptic effect of the crystal. The phase locking could be maintained over 1 h. Received: 27 January 1998/Revised version: 9 March 1998     

High-repetition-rate eyesafe intracavity optical parametric oscillator

Received: 15 December 1997/Revised version: 27 April 1998     

Tunable, high-power, narrow-band picosecond IR radiation by optical parametric amplification in KTP

We report on an optical parametric amplifier (OPA) based on two potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP) crystals in a walk-off compensating geometry. An Nd:YLF regenerative amplifier at a 1-kHz repetition rate serves as the pump source. The seed beam is delivered by a synchronously pumped frequency-stabilized optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN). At pump intensities of about 7 GW/cm² large amplification factors of more than 10⁴ were achieved, resulting in pulse energies of more than 450 μJ and 350 μJ for the signal and idler pulses, respectively, at a 1-kHz repetition rate. In the saturation regime the time–bandwidth product increases from two to three times the Fourier limit, with a pulse duration of 105 ps and a bandwidth of 12.7 GHz at the highest intensities employed. Received: 2 November 2001 / Published online: 14 March 2002     

High-power picosecond LiB3O5 optical parametric oscillators tunable in the blue spectral range

The paper reports on an experimental investigation and numerical analysis of noncritically and critically phasematched LiB₃O₅ (LBO) optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) synchronously pumped by the third harmonic of a cw diode-pumped mode-locked Nd:YVO₄ oscillator–amplifier system. The laser system generates 9.0 W of 355-nm mode-locked radiation with a pulse duration of 7.5 ps and a repetition rate of 84 MHz. The LBO OPO, synchronously pumped by the 355-nm pulses, generates a signal wave tunable in the blue spectral range 457–479 nm. With a power of up to 5.0 W at 462 nm and 1.7 W at 1535 nm the conversion efficiency is 74%. The OPO is characterized experimentally by measuring the output power (and its dependence on the pump power, the transmission of the output coupler and the resonator length) and the pulse properties (such as pulse duration and spectral width). Also the beam quality of the resonant and nonresonant waves is investigated. The measured results are compared with the predictions of a numerical analysis for Gaussian laser and OPO beams. In addition to the blue-signal output visible-red 629-nm radiation is generated by sum-frequency mixing of the 1.535-μm infrared idler wave with the residual 1.064-μm laser radiation. A power of 1.25 W of 1.535-μm idler radiation and 5.7 W of 1.064-μm laser light generated a red 629-nm output power of 2.25 W. Received: 2 February 2000 / Revised version: 28 July 2000 / Published online: 22 November 2000     

Temporal behavior of a high repetition rate infrared optical parametric oscillator based on periodically poled materials

The temporal behavior of a nanosecond pulsed singly resonant periodically poled lithium niobate optical parametric oscillator has been studied both theoretically and experimentally. Taking into account the cylindrical symmetry of the system, a numerical model based on the Hankel transform has been developed. Good agreement is obtained between experiment and simulation. Moreover, the computation time is reduced roughly by a factor of 60 compared to the usual simulation software. Received: 23 April 2001 / Published online: 19 September 2001     

Single-pulse time- and fluence-resolved optical measurements at femtosecond excited surfaces

We describe a new technique for optical pump–probe measurements at femtosecond excited surfaces. By combining time-resolved microscopy with cylindrical focusing of the pump, complete mapping of the time and fluence dependence of laser-induced optical changes becomes possible in a single-pulse experiment. Received: 16 August 1999 / Accepted: 17 August 1999 / Published online: 30 September 1999     

Tuning and stability of a continuous-wave mid-infrared high-power single resonant optical parametric oscillator

A 2.2-W continuous-wave, continuously tunable, single-frequency OPO has been developed in the 3.0–3.8 μm wavelength range for the detection of molecular trace gasses. The oscillation threshold, output power and stability of the single resonant OPO were improved by optimizing pump beam waist and OPO cavity length. Both air-spaced and solid etalons were tested to frequency stabilize and tune the OPO, from which the solid etalon gave a better performance. Temperature oscillations in the PPLN crystal caused oscillations in the idler wavelength of less than 200 MHz over 300 s; the short-term stability was less than 3 MHz over 1 s. The high laser power, in combination with photoacoustic spectroscopy, achieved a detection limit of 10 parts-per-trillion for ethane in nitrogen. Received: 9 April 2002 / Revised version: 14 June 2002 / Published online: 2 September 2002 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author. Fax:+31-24/3653311, E-Mail: maartenh@sci.kun.nl     

Focusing dependence of the efficiency of a singly resonant optical parametric oscillator

Received: 15 February 1998/Revised version: 6 April 1998     

Numerical analysis of the spatial behaviour of nanosecond optical parametric oscillators of beta-barium borate

We report on a numerical analysis of the temporal and spatial beam properties of nanosecond optical parametric oscillators (OPOs). The analysis is performed for a 355-nm-pumped critically phase-matched OPO of beta-barium borate. The calculations provide detailed information on the dependence of the OPO beam quality (measured by the quality factor M ²) on pump energy. An important result is the strong increase of the M ² value for pump energies exceeding 1–2 times the energy at threshold. Furthermore, a temporal analysis of single OPO pulses indicates that the M ² value strongly increases during the first few nanoseconds of the OPO oscillation. This increase is understood by considering the temporal dynamics of the spatial profiles of the OPO signal beam and the depleted pump radiation. Received: 1 April 1999 / Revised version: 26 July 1999 / Published online: 20 October 1999     

Electric-field reconstruction of femtosecond laser pulses from interferometric autocorrelation using an evolutionary algorithm

We present an evolutionary algorithm for reconstructing a femtosecond laser pulse from its interferometric autocorrelation trace and laser spectrum. The algorithm is optimized for the intensity and phase characterization of several-cycle optical pulses. We tested this algorithm with numerically-generated femtosecond pulses and then applied it to experimental data. In the experiment, a negatively chirped 31-fs pulse and a sub-10-fs pulse containing high-order phase distortion were characterized. Frequency-resolved optical gating measurements, performed for comparison, confirm the reliability of our technique.     

Intracavity optical parametric oscillator at 1572-nm wavelength pumped by passively Q-switched diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser

An intracavity optical parametric oscillator (IOPO) based on bulk KTP crystal was constructed with a Nd:YAG slab as an active medium pumped by a 300-W diode array and Cr:YAG as a passive Q-switch. A signal pulse of 1.9-mJ energy at 1572-nm wavelength was demonstrated. In the cavity, optimized with respect to single-pulse energy, a five-fold shortening of signal-pulse duration with respect to 1064-nm pump radiation was observed. A twice as large level of signal peak power of 650 kW, compared to the pump laser in the same cavity without the IOPO, was achieved. A conversion efficiency of 44% with respect to the 1064-nm pump beam and 3.8% with respect to diode pump energy was demonstrated. Received: 15 October 2002 / Revised version: 19 February 2003 / Published online: 16 April 2003 RID="*" ID="*"Corresponding author. Fax: +48-22/666-8950, E-mail: wzendzian@wat.edu.pl     

Intensity noise of pump-enhanced continuous-wave optical parametric oscillators

4 (RTA), which provides a threshold pump power of 16 mW. The maximum signal wave power is 23 mW at a wavelength of 1243 nm. The spectral bandwidth of the signal wave is less than 750 kHz. Received: 3 February 1998     

Diode-laser-seeded optical parametric oscillator for airborne water vapor DIAL application in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere

Received: 4 May 1998/Revised version: 17 July 1998     

Generation of fs laser pulses from a ps pulse-pumped optical parametric amplifier with a beat-wave seed signal

We describe a method of ultrashort-pulse and ultrafast-pulse-train generation through optical parametric amplification of a laser beat wave. Numerical simulation shows that 250-fs laser pulses at 1.55 μm are generated from a beat-wave seeded optical parametric amplifier pumped by a 30-ps laser at 1064 nm. The pulse compression is attributable to sideband generation and parametric amplification under group velocity mismatch. Our experimental result confirms efficient generation of comb-like sidebands for the mixing waves from such an optical parametric amplifier.     

A pulsed optical parametric oscillator, based on periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN), for high-resolution spectroscopy

-1 ), approaching the limit imposed by the Fourier transform of the pulse duration. Received: 31 August 1998     

Laser spectroscopy with a pulsed, narrowband infrared optical parametric oscillator system: a practical, modular approach

-1 in a single scan. The potential of the OPO system for linear and nonlinear-optical spectroscopy is demonstrated by recording high-resolution photoacoustic absorption and coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectra of methane, as a gas and in a pulsed supersonic free jet. This narrowband tunable infrared source is shown to scan reliably with an optical bandwidth as small as 0.007 cm^-1 (210 MHz) full width half maximum (fwhm), close to the fourier-transform limit. Received: 5 February 1998/Revised version: 6 March 1998     

Mid-infrared femtosecond optical parametric generator pumped by a Cr:forsterite regenerative amplifier at 1.25 μm

We demonstrate a novel traveling-wave type optical parametric generator based on 1.25 μm pumping of AgGaS₂ that produces tunable, high-power and almost transform-limited 200-fs pulses in the mid-infrared up to 8 μm. Received: 24 January 2000 / Revised version: 1 March 2000 / Published online: 5 April 2000