Sandia Corporation

William J Alford

Arlee Virgil Smith

Thomas Daniel Raymond

Andrew A Allerman

Mary H Crawford

Mark S Bowers

A method to improving optical parametric oscillator (OPO) beam quality having an optical pump, which generates a pump beam at a pump frequency greater than a desired signal frequency, a nonlinear optical medium oriented so that a signal wave at the desired signal frequency and a corresponding idler wave are produced when the pump beam (wave) propagates through the nonlinear optical medium, resulting in beam walk off of the signal and idler waves, and an optical cavity which directs the signal wave to repeatedly pass through the nonlinear optical medium, said optical cavity comprising an equivalently even number of non-planar mirrors that produce image rotation on each pass through the nonlinear optical medium. Utilizing beam walk off where the signal wave and said idler wave have nonparallel Poynting vectors in the nonlinear medium and image rotation, a correlation zone of distance equal to approximately &rgr;L is created which, through multiple passes through the nonlinear medium, improves the beam quality of the OPO output.

Method to improve optical parametric oscillator beam quality

An optical parametric oscillator (OPO) having an optical pump, which generates a pump beam at a pump frequency greater than a desired signal frequency, a nonlinear optical medium oriented so that a signal wave at the desired signal frequency and a corresponding idler wave are produced when the pump beam (wave) propagates through the nonlinear optical medium, resulting in beam walk off of the signal and idler waves, and an optical cavity which directs the signal wave to repeatedly pass through the nonlinear optical medium, said optical cavity comprising an equivalently even number of non-planar mirrors that produce image rotation on each pass through the nonlinear optical medium. Utilizing beam walk off where the signal wave and said idler wave have nonparallel Poynting vectors in the nonlinear medium and image rotation, a correlation zone of distance equal to approximately &rgr;L is created which, through multiple passes through the nonlinear medium, improves the beam quality of the OPO output.

Optical parametric osicllators with improved beam quality

A frequency-doubled semiconductor vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser (VECSEL) is disclosed for generating light at a wavelength in the range of 300-550 nanometers. The VECSEL includes a semiconductor multi-quantum-well active region that is electrically or optically pumped to generate lasing at a fundamental wavelength in the range of 600-1100 nanometers. An intracavity nonlinear frequency-doubling crystal then converts the fundamental lasing into a second-harmonic output beam. With optical pumping with 330 milliWatts from a semiconductor diode pump laser, about 5 milliWatts or more of blue light can be generated at 490 nm. The device has applications for high-density optical data storage and retrieval, laser printing, optical image projection, chemical-sensing, materials processing and optical metrology.

Frequency-doubled vertical-external-cavity surface-emitting laser

A more efficient class of optical parametric oscillators is made possible by introducing means for reducing signal losses due to backconversion of signal photons in the nonlinear optical medium.

Growing community of inventors

Albuquerque, NM, United States of America

William J Alford