Abstract
The demand for femtosecond sources at new wavelengths in the near to mid-infrared together with the emergence of the self-mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser as a convenient pump source has led recently to the development of femtosecond optical parametric oscillators. We report here the operation of a synchronously pumped femtosecond optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on a 1.5 mm thick crystal of KTP cut for noncritical phase-matching. Pumped by 85 fs pulses from a self-modelocked Ti:sapphire laser the OPO is tunable over the bandwidth of the mirrors from 1.1 -1.3 μm and pump tuning over 100 nm is demonstrated. Our intracavity dispersion-compensated OPO has been operated in both three-mirror and four-mirror standing-wave geometries using single-pass pumping and exploiting a variety of mode-matching configurations. In addition, the observation of soliton generation in the femtosecond OPO is described. A typical spectrum and interferometric autocorrelation of the signal pulses produced in the three-mirror configuration are presented in Figure 1 and correspond to bandwidth-limited 39 fs pulses with intracavity peak powers approaching 1 MW [1]. The shortest pulses are observed when operating at near-zero intracavity GVD.
© 1994 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
A. Nebel, C. Fallnich, Th. Herrmann, Ch. Gräßer, D. Wang, R. Beigang, and R. Wallenstein
FO3 Advanced Solid State Lasers (ASSL) 1994
G. M. Gale, F. Hache, and L. I. Pavlov
WC.1 International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena (UP) 1994
T. J. Driscoll, G. M. Gale, and F. Hache
CWA2 The European Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO/Europe) 1994