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Physical Review A

Optical-parametric-generation process driven by femtosecond pulses: Timing and carrier-envelope phase properties

Cristian Manzoni, Giovanni Cirmi, Daniele Brida, S. De Silvestri, Giulio Cerullo

Published Mar 16, 2009• 55 citations

Abstract

We investigate, both numerically and experimentally, the optical parametric generation (OPG) process in second-order nonlinear crystals driven by femtosecond pulses. We model the OPG process by solving the coupled second-order three-wave nonlinear propagation equations in the plane-wave limit, using noise fields to mimic the vacuum fluctuations. We focus on two parameters: (i) the temporal jitter between the OPG and the pump pulse; (ii) the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) relationship between the OPG and the pump pulse. Both numerical simulations and experiments support the following conclusions: (i) in the regime of low pump depletion the OPG pulse is synchronized with the pump, but its energy presents strong fluctuations; (ii) in the regime of high pump depletion, the energy of the OPG pulse stabilizes, but a temporal jitter with respect to the pump pulse is introduced; (iii) in both cases, the CEP relationship between pump and OPG pulses is completely random.

DOI: 10.1103/physreva.79.033818

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We investigate, both numerically and experimentally, the optical parametric generation (OPG) process in second-order nonlinear crystals driven by femtosecond pulses. We model the OPG process by solving the coupled second-order three-wave nonlinear propagation equations in the plane-wave limit, using noise fields to mimic the vacuum fluctuations. We focus on two parameters: (i) the temporal jitter between the OPG and the pump pulse; (ii) the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) relationship between the OPG and the pump pulse. Both numerical simulations and experiments support the following conclusions: (i) in the regime of low pump depletion the OPG pulse is synchronized with the pump, but its energy presents strong fluctuations; (ii) in the regime of high pump depletion, the energy of the OPG pulse stabilizes, but a temporal jitter with respect to the pump pulse is introduced; (iii) in both cases, the CEP relationship between pump and OPG pulses is completely random.

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A ${\ensuremath{\chi}}^{(2)}$ nonlinear optical crystal is pumped by two temporally well-distinguishable femtosecond laser pulses to generate entangled photon pairs in the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We have observed first- and second-order interference between amplitudes generated from the first and the second pump pulse as a function of the time delay between the two pump pulses. The criteria for first- and second-order interference are found to be very different, which reflect the quantum entanglement nature of the state of spontaneous parametric down-conversion.

High-gain optical parametric amplification is an important nonlinear process used both as a source of coherent infrared light and as a source of nonclassical light. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate an approach to optical parametric amplification that enables extremely large parametric gains with low energy requirements. In conventional nonlinear media driven by femtosecond pulses, multiple dispersion orders limit the effective interaction length available for parametric amplification. Here, we use the dispersion engineering available in periodically poled thin-film lithium niobate nanowaveguides to eliminate several dispersion orders at once. The result is a quasi-static process; the large peak intensity associated with a short pump pulse can provide gain to signal photons without undergoing pulse distortion or temporal walk-off. We characterize the parametric gain available in these waveguides using optical parametric generation, where vacuum fluctuations are amplified to macroscopic intensities. In the unsaturated regime, we observe parametric gains as large as 71 dB (118 dB/cm) spanning 1700–2700 nm with pump energies of only 4 pJ. When driven with pulse energies > 10 p J , we observe saturated parametric gains as large as 88 dB ( > 146 d B / c m ). The devices shown here achieve saturated optical parametric generation with orders of magnitude less pulse energy than previous techniques.

We demonstrate experimentally the short pulse amplitude squeezed light from a singly resonant synchronously pumped optical parametric oscillator (SPOPO). The SPOPO operates in the frequency degenerate case and below threshold, with using a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate crystal. The pump laser is the second harmonic of a ultrashort mode-locked femtosecond pulse at 850 nm. The reduction of quantum noise of 2.58 dB is obtained experimentally. The squeezing extent is deduced to be 4.48 dB.