Abstract
The lasers that we have discussed until now are based on amplification brought about by stimulated emission. In this scheme, population inversion is achieved between two energy levels of an atomic system and this inversion is used for amplification of light. In contrast an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is a coherent source of light like a laser but uses the process of optical amplification brought about by the phenomenon of non-linear interaction in a crystal. Since no energy levels are involved in the amplification process it is possible to tune these lasers over a very broad range of wavelengths. In OPOs the pump is another laser which is used to pump a non-linear crystal within a resonant cavity and the non-linear interaction in the crystal leads to the conversion of the pump laser into two waves (called signal and idler) at new wavelengths.
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Notes
- 1.
In actual practice electric field and polarization are vector quantities and Eq. (14.2) is a simplified scalar representation. The ith component of the polarization is given by
$$P_i = \varepsilon _0 \chi _{ij} E_j + \varepsilon _0 \chi _{ijk}^{(2)} E_j E_k + \varepsilon _0 \chi _{ijkl}^{(3)} E_j E_k E_l + \ldots$$where \(\chi _{ij}\), \(\chi _{ijk}^{(2)}\), \(\chi _{ijkl}^{(3)}\), etc. are tensors and repeated indices on the right-hand side are summed over 1 to 3. For a given non-linear medium and given components of the electric fields of the interacting waves, the component equation can be used to obtain Eq. (14.2) where \(\chi ^{\left(2\right)}\) will be an effective second-order susceptibility.
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Thyagarajan, K., Ghatak, A. (2011). Optical Parametric Oscillators. In: Lasers. Graduate Texts in Physics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6442-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6442-7_14
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