Abstract

Continuous-wave (cw) optical parametric oscillators (OPO's) are well suited to high-resolution spectroscopy applications e.g [eg 1] Due to their low thresholds there has been interest in using cw OPO's in which two of the interacting fields are resonated in the same cavity (eg doubly-resonant OPO's (DRO's) [1] and pump-enhanced singly-resonant OPO's (PE-SRO's) [2]) Common-cavity DRO's have exhibited signal and idler tuning ranges equivalent to several cavity free-spectral-ranges (FSR's), but PE-SRO's are limited by mode-hopping to typically less than one FSR unless the phase-matching is tuned synchronously with pump frequency Further, the idler tuning range is limited in both cases to only a fraction (ν_i/ν_p where ν_i and ν_p are the idler and pump frequencies respectively) of the pump-laser tuning range.

© 2000 IEEE