Widely tunable room-temperature continuous-wave optical parametric oscillator based on periodically-poled KTiOPO4.

Abstract

We report the first realization of widely tunable continuous-wave (cw) optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on periodically-poled KTiOPO4 (PPKTP) at room temperature. By exploiting fan-out grating design in a 30-mm PPKTP crystal, and configured in an output-coupled singly-resonant oscillator (OC-SRO) configuration pumped at 532 nm in the green, the OPO provides finely tunable radiation across 741-922 nm in the signal and 1258-1884 nm in the idler, at a fixed temperature of 25 °C. The use of output coupling for the signal wave enables enhancement of OPO extraction efficiency to 30%, providing a maximum total output power of 1.65 W (450 mW of signal at 901 nm and 1.2 W of idler at 1299 nm) for 5.5 W of pump power. The output idler exhibits passive power stability better than 3.2% rms over >2 mins, and the extracted signal exhibits frequency stability of 194 MHz over more than 35 seconds, in excellent beam quality. The OPO performance in pure SRO configuration has also been investigated.