Tunable ultrafast laser sources have found applications in various photonics and biophotonics techniques from nonlinear and multiphoton spectroscopy to multimodal bioimaging. There is a full diversity of these devices on the market, except for lasers in the visible spectral range. This shortfall is explained by technical problems due to limited tuning range to the phase matching bandwidth of optical parametric oscillators (OPO) with frequency doubling and limited pump power of UV sources for direct optical parametric design.

The authors of this publication in Photonics Research demonstrated a high power, high repetition rate quickly tunable (100 nm/ms) non-collinear OPO, which is directly pumped by the third harmonic of an Yb-fiber laser. Due to the non-collinear phase matching scheme, the signal wavelength covers almost the entire visible spectral range from 440 to 720 nm by varying the cavity length only. The authors have achieved stable output pulses with power up to 452 mW at 1.4% RMS and duration down to 286 fs. Hopefully this achievement will expand many applications in spectroscopy, metrology, and quantum optics.

---

---

 Add Comment

You must log in to add comments.