Abstract

We present a femtosecond Optical Parametric Amplificator (OPA) which was conceived to perform surgical interventions on eyes using eye-safe wavelengths. It is pumped by a Ti: sapphire laser emmiting 50 fs pulses at 820 nm and at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. A particular effort was made to obtain a very flat and efficient gain spectrum especially around degeneracy. An OPA scheme using consecutively β-BaB₂O₄ (BBO) crystal and BiB₃O₆ (BiBO) provides the required behaviour (figure 1). While most OPA are composed of identical crystals on all stages, the originality of our configuration consists in combining the advantages of two different crystals.

© 2009 IEEE