Thulium Fiber Laser-Pumped Mid-IR OPO

摘要

Fiber lasers are advancing rapidly due to their ability to generate stable, efficient, and diffraction-limited beams with significant peak and average powers. This is of particular interest as fibers provide an ideal pump source for driving parametric processes. Most nonlinear optical crystals which provide phase-matching to the mid-IR at commercially available fiber pump wavelengths suffer from high absorption above 4μm, resulting in low conversion efficiencies in the 4-5μm spectral region. The nonlinear optical crystals which combine low absorption in this same spectral region with high nonlinear gain require pumping at longer wavelengths (typically ＞1.9μm). In this paper, we report a novel mid-IR OPO pumped by a pulsed thulium-doped fiber laser operating at 2-microns. The eyesafe thulium-fiber pump laser generates ＞3W of average power at ＞30kHz repetition rate with 15-30ns pulses in a near diffraction-limited beam. The ZnGeP_2 (ZGP) OPO produces tunable mid-IR output power in the 3.4-3.99μm (signal) and the 4.0-4.7μm (idler) spectral regions in both singly resonant (SRO) and doubly resonant (DRO) formats. The highest mid-IR output power achieved from this system was 800mW with 20% conversion efficiency at 40kHz. In a separate experiment, the 3W of 2-micron light was further amplified to the 20W level. This amplified output was also used to pump a ZGP OPO, resulting in 2W of output power in the mid-IR. To our knowledge, these are the first demonstrations of a fiber-pumped ZGP OPO.