Abstract

Recent reports¹ of the surprisingly poor performance of high average power frequency conversion of copper vapor laser radiation have shown higher power extraction from sum frequency mixing of the two emitted wavelengths than from second harmonic generation from either. By contrast, early work at low average powers² was completely consistent with standard theoretical predictions. We report here a detailed investigation of the performance of harmonic generation at high average powers in which complete agreement with theory is found.

© 1990 Optical Society of America