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An OPO/OPA frequency conversion setup was designed and built as a demonstration module to address the 1.6 μm range. The pump laser is an Nd:YAG-MOPA system, consisting of a stable oscillator and two subsequent Innoslab-based amplifier stages that deliver up to 500 mJ of output pulse energy at 100 Hz repetition frequency. The OPO is inherited from the OPO design for the CH4 lidar instrument on the French-German climate satellite MERLIN. In order to address the 100 mJ regime, the OPO output beam is amplified in a subsequent multistage OPA. With KTP as nonlinear medium, the OPO/OPA delivered more than 100 mJ of output energy at 1645 nm from 450 mJ of the pump energy and a pump pulse duration of 30 ns. This corresponds to a quantum conversion efficiency of about 25 %.
Besides demonstrating optical performance for future lidar systems, this laser will be part of a LIDT test facility, which will be used to qualify optical components especially for the MERLIN mission.
We will discuss technical implementation and characterization of different optical parametric generators (OPG) based on periodically poled Lithium Niobate (PPLN) to show the parameter flexibility of this approach as well as current technical limits. Actual design examples will address output wavelengths between 1.6 μm and 3.4 μm with output powers ranging from several watts to tens of watts. The pulse parameters of these lasers range from a pulse duration of 9 ps with a repetition rate of 86 MHz to 1.5 ns and 100 kHz.
The spectral bandwidth of the OPG examined can be very large. In particular, spectral bandwidths of about 100 nm are measured at the degenerated point, where the output wavelength is equal to twice the pump wavelength. Even beyond this point, a spectrum of typically a few tens of nanometers width generally accompanies a large conversion efficiency (>50 %). For applications that require a narrower spectrum, the OPG can be operated in a seeded mode, where only a few milliwatts of power from a continuously emitting laser diode are sufficient to seed a pulsed high power OPG efficiently and reduce the bandwidth to few nanometers.
High efficient difference frequency generation of tunable visible light in a self-controlled process
High-efficiency high-beam-quality 38-W Nd:YAG slab laser end-pumped by a stack with three diode bars
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