Juggling with light: powerful second-order nonlinear optical effects in whispering gallery resonators

Abstract

Whispering gallery resonators made out of crystalline materials exhibiting second-order nonlinearities enable frequency mixing such as optical parametric oscillation with high efficiency at low optical input powers and are ideally suited to realize versatile and compact optical frequency converters. Recent achievements stimulate this field further: Frequency conversion not only at a single wavelength or with few wavelengths is possible, entire frequency combs can be transferred into different spectral domains, e.g., allowing the realization of frequency combs in spectral regions that are suitable for multicomponent analytics like the mid-infrared region. Furthermore, these resonators are also supposed to be the ideal host for cascaded nonlinearities allowing the build-up of frequency combs based on second-order nonlinearities. All this comes with new and better schemes to tune whispering gallery resonators, providing advanced opportunities to modulate the laser wavelengths with nanosecond speed employing the Pockels effect. Juggling with light: We will summarize in the presentation these recent achievements, demonstrating that in the field of whispering gallery resonators still many discoveries are ahead of us.