Abstract

Fiber optical parametric oscillators (FOPOs) based on a parametric four wave mixing (FWM) process offer an opportunity to generate tunable laser radiation in new spectral ranges, where conventional fiber lasers are not effective or not available. In contrast to pulsed FOPOs operating at high-power pumping, continuous wave (CW) FOPOs utilize rather low-power pump sources thus requiring long nonlinear fibers. However, a fiber lengthening leads to increasing influence of dispersion fluctuations resulting in efficiency reduction at large parametric frequency shifts. This principal constraint limits a number of the CW FOPOs realizations to date [1-4], in spite of a great demand for CW tunable fiber sources in various applications. The developed oscillators are pumped near 1.55 μm and usually use highly nonlinear dispersion shifted fibers (HNLFs) of >100 meters length. The widest tuning range and the highest Stokes output power obtained in such FOPOs are 250 nm (1480–1730 nm) [2] and 1W [3] respectively. However, the anti-Stokes power did not exceed 100 mW [3]. As for 1 μm spectral range, the parametric process has been studied only in single-pass scheme with low conversion efficiency of 0.3% [4]. CW FOPO operating below 1 μm has not been demonstrated yet, to our knowledge.

© 2013 IEEE