Abstract

There is a great deal of current interest in the generation of ultrashort UV pulses using solid-state sources and nonlinear optical techniques, such as sum-frequency mixing. In general, the birefringence of nonlinear optical crystals becomes highly wavelength dependent as one approaches the UV range, placing severe limitations on the phase-matching of broad bandwidth short pulses at these high optical frequencies. As a result, various techniques have been developed that use spatial dispersion of the input light to achieve phase matching over a broad bandwidth in either a frequency doubling¹ or a sum-frequency generation² process.

© 1994 Optical Society of America