Feature
A Violet to Mid-Infrared Barium Borate Optical Parametric Oscillator
The combination of nonlinear optical materials developments and improvements in optical pump sources are leading to rapid advances in many areas of nonlinear frequency conversion and the generation of tunable coherent radiation. The demonstration of barium borate (BaB2O4) Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO) pumped by a single-axial-mode 355-nm source is an example of one such advance. An average output power of 140 mW with power conversion efficiency of 13% was achieved in the OPO signal wave, and combined conversion efficiency of 24% was achieved in signal and idler waves. This BaB2O4 OPO was continuously tuned from 412 run to 2.55 μm limited by the infrared transmission range of the crystal. Linewidths of 23 GHz were observed with a simple plane parallel OPO cavity, and single mode parametric oscillation was achieved when the OPO was injection seeded with narrow bandwidth 532-nm or 1.064-μm radiation available from the pump source.
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