Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Indirectly seeded optical parametric generation in PPLN
M. J. Orozco-Arellanes, F. Alonso, L. A. Ríos, Roger Sean Cudney
Abstract
We show that pulsed quasi-phase matched optical parametric generation can be indirectly seeded with a weak cw beam with a wavelength different from that of either the signal or the idler waves. This is accomplished by first mixing the cw seed beam with the pulsed pump beam in a periodically poled lithuim niobate (PPLN) crystal to produce a weak signal beam which is then further amplified in the same crystal. The crystal has two regions with different domain structure periodicities. In the first region the periodicity is chosen to create a beam at 1561.5 nm, resulting from mixing a 15 mW, 632.8 nm beam and an intense, 7 ns 1064 nm pulse. In the second region, the periodicity produces amplification of this signal beam at 1561.5 nm. The output beam inherits the spectral and mode characteristics of the weak seed beam.