Abstract

An important characteristic of pulsed, nanosecond optical parametric oscillators (OPO), particularly for lidar applications and photo-acoustic spectroscopy, is the product of bandwidth and pulse duration. In contrast to bandwidth narrowing by injection seeding of a nanosecond OPO, a grazing incidence (GI) grating configuration GI-OPO [1] seems to be more cost-effective as it does not require a series of single-mode seed sources to cover a wide tuning range. Additionally, the traveling pump-wave geometry for a ring GI-OPO [2] presented in this work, has resulted in a decrease of the bandwidth - pulse-duration product and is now close to the Fourier limit of a Gaussian pulse.

© 2001 EPS