Widely Tunable Near-Infrared Wavelength Conversion Based on Central and Off-Central Multiperiod Grating Pumped by a Compact Fiber Laser

Abstract

Tunable near-infrared sources are highly demanded due to their various applications in biomedicine, printing, barcode technology, and optical storage. In this paper, widely central phase-matching wavelength tunable and high efficiency are demonstrated in theoretically and experimentally, pumped by a compact all-polarization-maintaining (PM) 9-character cavity fiber laser operating near-infrared (785 nm) based on a multiperiod grating. The wavelength tuned at about 18.2 nm as the grating period changed 1 $\mu \text{m}$ . A wide spectral tuning of 42 nm (from 776 nm to 818 nm) and high efficiency about 12.3% have been obtained. Besides, we discovered that the non-central second harmonic can also be generated from the second harmonic generation caused by strong phase mismatch, and the sum frequency generation (SFG) on account of the nonlinearity of the crystal. The result shows that the central and off-central phases match harmonics to form continuous broadband at some temperatures and grating periods, which can be widely exploited for wavelength conversion and tunable channel output.

Keywords

• Optical tuning
• optical harmonic generation
• nonlinear optics
• periodic structures
• gratings