Modeling and Control of Nonlinear Optical Wavelength Conversion

摘要

A key issue for high power lasers in general and for high-power OPOs. As that the intense laser light tends to heat the gain medium (i.e. the crystal) as some of the light is absorbed. We therefore developed a numerical model to simulate thermal effects in optical parametric oscillators. First, we implemented a wavelength conversion code using radially-symmetric Hankel transforms to speed up the simulations. Many comparisons of different Hankel and fast Hankel transforms were done to determine which would be the best one to use. Once this was working we then added thermal effects. Because of the tremendously disparate timescales an algorithm was developed to accelerate the numerical simulation of the thermal evolution. The results of these studies also allowed several potential improvements to this acceleration algorithm to be identified. Note that without specific algorithms to speed up the simulations, numerical run times would be prohibitive.