Idler second harmonic generation in femtosecond BBO optical parametric amplification

Abstract

For femtosecond optical parametric amplification (OPA) pumped with a 400nm blue laser, limited by phase-matched condition and nonlinear crystal transparent range, the tuning range of the output parametric laser is restricted, and the blue and the near UV lasers with wavelength less than 460nm are difficult to obtain. In our experiment, we adopted the second harmonic of a Ti:sapphire nine-pass chirp pulse amplifier at 1kHz repetition rate as the pump beam, and the white- light supercontinuum as the seed beam; thus, by a type-Ⅰ noncollinear phase-mat ched broad bandwidth β-BaB2O4 (BBO) OPA, with certain exp erimental paramete rs, the amplified signal beam from 530nm to 810nm and the idler beam from 81 0nm to 17μm were obtained; at the same time, the idler second harmonic fr om 410nm to 700nm was obtained also. The idler second harmonic was cascaded with the idler beam, its pulse energy was 26μJ and the conversion efficienc y was greater than 5%. Therefore, femtosecond pulses tuned continuously from 410 nm to 810nm can be obtained by the BBO OPA with a single crystal only, there by a useful source is provided for more investigations and applications. In this paper, we also have theoretically analyzed the generation condition of the idle r second harmonic for femtosecond OPA.