High-power, widely tunable, room-temperature picosecond optical parametric oscillator based on cylindrical 5%MgO:PPLN

Abstract : We report a high-power picosecond optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on cylindrical MgO:PPLN synchronously pumped by an Yb-fiber laser. The singly resonant OPO is tunable in the near-infrared signal across 1413–1900 nm and mid-infrared idler over 2418–4307 nm by angle tuning of the crystal at room temperature. With non-optimized output coupling of ∼10%, the OPO simultaneously delivers 2.4 W of signal at 1664 nm and 1.7 W of idler at 2950 nm at an overall extraction efficiency of ∼45% with high beam-pointing stability <30  μrad and <14  μrad for the signal and idler, respectively. The generated signal and idler exhibit passive power stability better than 1% rms and 0.8% rms over 15 h, respectively, in high beam quality with TEM00 profile. The extracted signal pulses from the OPO have duration of 15.2 ps with a spectral bandwidth of 0.7 nm, corresponding to a time-bandwidth product of ΔvΔtau∼1.2.