Ultra-stable high-power mid-infrared optical parametric oscillator pumped by a super-fluorescent fiber source

• Published in: Optics express 2016-09, Vol.24 (19), p.21684-21692
• Main Authors: Shang, Yaping, Xu, Jiangming, Wang, Peng, Li, Xiao, Zhou, Pu, Xu, Xiaojun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.24.021684

The longterm stability of the laser system is very important in many applications. In this letter, an ultra-stable, broadband, mid-infrared (MIR) optical parametric oscillator (OPO) pumped by a super-fluorescent fiber source is demonstrated. An idler MIR output power of 11.3 W with excellent beam quality was obtained and the corresponding pump-to-idler conversion slope efficiency was 15.9%. Furthermore, during 1h measurement at full power operation, the peak-to-peak fluctuation of idler output power was less than 1.9% and the corresponding standard deviation was less than 0.4% RMS, which was much better than that of a traditional single mode fiber laser pumped OPO system (10.9% for peak-to-peak fluctuation and 1.8% RMS for the standard deviation) in another experiment for comparison. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration on a high-power, ultra-stable OPO system by using the modefree pump source, which offered an effective approach to achieve an ultra-stable MIR source and broadened the range of the super-fluorescent fiber source applications.