High Conversion Efficiency, Mid-Infrared Pulses Generated via Burst-Mode Fiber Laser Pumped Optical Parametric Oscillator

Abstract

We present a mid-infrared optical parametric oscillator (OPO) with a high pump-to-idler conversion efficiency from 1.06 μm to 3.8 μm, which was quasi-synchronously pumped by a burstmode fiber laser. The pump pulse was specially designed with a rectangular profile in temporal, which was composed of hundreds of ultrashort sub-pulses. By applying the quasi-synchronous pumping scheme, the buildup time of the parametric signal pulse could be minimized. No back-conversion effect was observed when the pump peak power was increased. A maximum pump-to-idler conversion efficiency of 19.6% was achieved when the number of intra-burst sub-pulses was set to be 240. By increasing the number of intraburst sub-pulses to be about 480, the maximum average output power of 7.9 W at 3.8 μm was realized under pump power of 45.3 W. The corresponding pump-to-idler conversion efficiency was computed to be about 17.5%. The experimental results show an improvement of 40% in pump-to-idler conversion efficiency for this quasi-synchronously pumped OPO when compared with the conventional long laser pulse pumped OPO.

Keywords

• Mid-infrared
• optical parametric oscillator
• quasi-synchronously pumped
• burst-mode fiber laser