Open AccessImproved beam quality from a high energy optical parametric oscillator using crystals with orthogonal critical planes
Author(s) -
Øystein Farsund,
Gunnar Arisholm,
Gunnar Rustad
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.18.009229
Subject(s) - optics , optical parametric oscillator , laser beam quality , fresnel number , quality (philosophy) , beam (structure) , resonator , parametric statistics , materials science , fresnel equations , light beam , energy (signal processing) , physics , laser beams , laser , refractive index , diffraction , mathematics , statistics , quantum mechanics
We demonstrate with simulations and experiments that an optical parametric oscillator using two different crystals with orthogonal walk-off planes can generate a symmetric, high-quality beam even if the resonator has a high Fresnel number. In the experiments we used KTA and BBO crystals to convert 5 ns pulses at 1.06 microm to 1.7 microm pulses with more than 10 mJ energy and beam quality M(2) approximately 2.