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range of periods, output wavelengths from 700 nm to 5000 nm can be generated in periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN). Another important feature of the OPO is the coherence and the spectral width of the generated radiation. When the pump power is significantly above threshold, the two output waves are, to a very good approximation, coherent states (laser-like waves). The bandwidth of the resonated wave is very narrow (as low as several kHz). The non-resonated generated wave also exhibits narrow bandwidth if a pump wave of narrow bandwidth is employed. The development of compact high efficiency OPO which generate widely tunable coherent radiation with small divergence and high angular pointing stability is a currently a topical problem. So far many efforts have been made to reduce the spectral bandwidth and the divergence of the OPO output beam. The spatial and spectral properties of a 355nm pumped pulsed ns-BBO OPO were improved by using type II phase matching and pump beam back reflection. In this way the OPO bandwidth was reduced by more than a factor of 20 to less than 0.1nm, and the divergence of the OPO beam was reduced in the phase matching plane by a factor of 5 to 1mrad. One recent applicationIntracavity OPO Interferometer Pulses oscillating inside the cavity of a mode-locked laser have a frequency spectrum and phase that is fixed to that cavity. The purpose mode-locking mechanism is to lock the phase and intensity of the different resonator modes together across a large spectral range and thus create temporally short pulses. If - for example - the cavity length changes the resonator modes will also move to different frequencies. The pulse will then adjust within several roundtrips to again be mode-locked and resonant inside the cavity. If one of the two pulses that oscillate in the common cavity experiences a slight phase shift (with respect to the other), to that pulse will correspond a set of modes shifted in frequency by the ratio of the phase shift to the round-trip time.
2 RT
This difference can be easily detected outside the cavity by interfering both pulses and measuring the beat node they produce. Since both pulses are part of the same cavity many imperfections of the setup cancel out automatically. To avoid backscattering from one pulse into the other it is however necessary to have the 2 pulses inside the cavity cross in vacuum or air. For the cavities to be identical for both pulses, the gain medium should be part of the same spatial cavity mode. This condition is satisfied if the OPO is pumped intracavity, which implies that the OPO crystal is part of both the pump and signal cavities. However, this configuration brings a new problem that the depletion of the pump by one pulse reduces the gain for the other one. In other words, there is a coupling between the two signal pulses through the pump pulse, with a time constant dependent of the energy relaxation time (energy storage time) of the pump gain medium. The
intracavity pumped setup also allows us to utilize the much higher intracavity intensities of the pump laser. Experiment setup--Phase measurement method The figure shows the OPO cavity, in which the crystal is pumped by two pump beams delayed with respect to each other (in blue). The two output pulses are made to interfere on a detector D after an optical delay line.
PPLN
D
Nonlinear index measurement: The OPO is pumped bidirectionally and an index change of n = n2 I is induced by the
pump pulse due to self phase modulation. If the pulse circulating clockwise has a different intensity from the counter clockwise pulse, then a beat note will be detected in the interfering detector because the optical length difference changes.
NL =
2 d
n2 ( I + I )
RT
n2 I
If the beat note frequency is measured multiple times corresponding to various intensity differences then we can determine the nonlinear index n2 . For example, the PPLN used in the OPO has a n2 = 8.5 10 15 cm 2 / W .
600 400 Beat frequency (kHz) 200 0 -200 -400 -0.6 -0.4 -0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2 Peak intensity difference (GW/cm )
3
2
NL =
2 d
n2 ( I + I )
RT
n2 = 8.5 1015 cm 2 / W
The figure shown above is from extracavity pumped OPO. It will be more stable using intracavity pumped OPO. Thus the beat frequency is likely to be at the resolution of 1Hz so that a phase difference of 108 could be measured. Any unknown nonlinear medium inside the OPO cavity can be measured in the same way. Cross phase modulation term can be eliminated if the two pulses dont overlap in the medium. This leads to precise measurement of the nonlinear index of a material.
Conclusion An intracavity pumped OPO is very sensitive tool to measure phase shifts between two pulses by generating a beat note frequency proportional to it. In practical applications the phase displacement can convert into length displacement or refractive index change. In this report a fine measurement of nonlinear refractive index is presented. References 1. R. W. Boyd, Nonlinear Optics(2nd edition) (1993) 2. N. V. Kondratyuk, O. Manko, and A. A. Shagov, Features of the angle-tuned phase-matched OPO with pump beam reflected, Proc. SPIE, Vol. 5478, 189 (2004) 3. X. Meng, J. Diels, D. Kuehlke, R. Batchko, and R. Byer, Bidirectional, synchronously pumped, ring optical parametric oscillator, Opt. Lett. 26:265-267 (2001) 4. X. Meng, etc. Intracavity pumped optical parametric oscillator bidirectional ring laser as a differential interferometer, Opt. Comm, 233:167-172, (2004) 5. A. Schmitt-Sody, A. Velten, J.-C. Diels, Synchronously pumped OPO with two pulses per cavity for intracavity phase measurements, (submitted CLEO 2009)