An optical parametric amplifier, abbreviated OPA, is a laser light source that emits light of variable wavelengths by an optical parametric amplification process. It is essentially the same as an optical parametric oscillator, but without the optical cavity (i.e., the light beams pass through the apparatus just once or twice, rather than many many times).
Optical parametric generation (OPG) (also called "optical parametric fluorescence", or "spontaneous parametric down conversion") often precedes optical parametric amplification.
In optical parametric generation, the input is one light beam of frequency ωp, and the output is two light beams of lower frequencies ωs and ωi, with the requirement ωp=ωs+ωi. These two lower-frequency beams are called the "signal" and "idler", respectively.
This light emission is based on the nonlinear optical principle. The photon of an incident laser pulse (pump) is, by a nonlinear optical crystal, divided into two lower-energy photons. The wavelengths of the signal and the idler are determined by the phase matching condition, which is changed, e.g. by temperature or, in bulk optics, by the angle between the incident pump laser ray and the optical axes of the crystal. The wavelengths of the signal and the idler photons can, therefore, be tuned by changing the phase matching condition.
The output beams in optical parametric generation are usually relatively weak and have relatively spread-out direction and frequency. This problem is solved by using optical parametric amplification (OPA), also called difference frequency generation, as a second stage after the OPG.
In an OPA, the input is two light beams, of frequency ωp and ωs. The OPA will make the pump beam (ωp) weaker, and amplify the signal beam (ωs), and also create a new, so-called idler beam at the frequency ωi with ωp=ωs+ωi.
In the OPA, the pump and idler photons usually travel collinearly through a nonlinear optical crystal. Phase matching is required for the process to work well.
Because the wavelengths of an OPG+OPA system can be varied (unlike most lasers which have a fixed wavelength), they are used in many spectroscopic methods.
As an example of OPA, the incident pump pulse is the 800 nm (12500 cm−1) output of a Ti:sapphire laser, and the two outputs, signal and idler, are in the near-infrared region, the sum of the wavenumber of which is equal to 12500 cm−1.
Because most nonlinear crystals are birefringent, beams that are collinear inside a crystal may not be collinear outside of it. The phase fronts (wave vector) do not point in the same direction as the energy flow (Poynting vector) because of walk-off.
The phase matching angle makes possible any gain at all (0th order). In a collinear setup, the freedom to choose the center wavelength allows a constant gain up to first order in wavelength. Noncollinear OPAs were developed to have an additional degree of freedom, allowing constant gain up to second order in wavelength. The optimal parameters are 4 degrees of noncollinearity, β-barium borate (BBO) as the material, a 400-nm pump wavelength, and signal around 800 nm (and can be tunable in the range 605-750 nm with sub-10 fs pulse width which allows exploring the ultrafast dynamics of large molecules [1] ) This generates a bandwidth 3 times as large of that of a Ti-sapphire-amplifier. The first order is mathematically equivalent to some properties of the group velocities involved, but this does not mean that pump and signal have the same group velocity. After propagation through 1-mm BBO, a short pump pulse no longer overlaps with the signal. Therefore, chirped pulse amplification must be used in situations requiring large gain amplification in long crystals. Long crystals introduce such a large chirp that a compressor is needed anyway. An extreme chirp can lengthen a 20-fs seed pulse to 50 ps, making it suitable for use as the pump. [1] Unchirped 50-ps pulses with high energy can be generated from rare earth-based lasers.
The optical parametric amplifier has a wider bandwidth than a -amplifier, which in turn has a wider bandwidth than an optical parametric oscillator because of white-light generation even one octave wide (for example using nonlinear self-phase modulation in neon gas [2] ). Therefore, a subband can be selected and fairly short pulses can still be generated.
The higher gain per mm for BBO compared to Ti:Sa and, more importantly, lower amplified spontaneous emission allows for higher overall gain. Interlacing compressors and OPA leads to tilted pulses.
Multipass can be used for walk off and group velocity (dispersion) compensation; constant intensity with increasing signal power means to have an exponential rising cross section. This can be done by means of lenses, which also refocus the beams to have the beam waist in the crystal; reduction of OPG by increasing the pump power proportional to the signal and splitting the pump across the passes of the signal; broadband amplification by dumping the idler and optionally individually detuning the crystals; complete pump depletion by offsetting the pump and signal in time and space at every pass and feeding one pump pulse through all passes; high gain with BBO, since BBO is only available in small dimensions. Since the direction of the beams is fixed, multiple passes cannot be overlapped into a single small crystal like in a Ti:Sa amplifier. Unless one uses noncolinear geometry and adjusts amplified beams onto the parametric fluorescence cone produced by the pump pulse. [1] [3]
The idea of parametric amplification first arose at much lower frequencies: AC circuits, including radio frequency and microwave frequency (in the earliest investigations, sound waves were also studied). In these applications, typically a strong pump signal (or "local oscillator") at frequency f passes through a circuit element whose parameters are modulated by the weak "signal" wave at frequency fs (for example, the signal might modulate the capacitance of a varactor diode [4] ). The result is that some of the energy of the local oscillator gets transferred to the signal frequency fs, as well as the difference ("idler") frequency f-fs. The term parametric amplifier is used because the parameters of the circuit are varied. [4]
The optical case uses the same basic principle—transferring energy from a wave at the pump frequency to waves at the signal and idler frequencies—so it took the same name.
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word laser is an anacronym that originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, based on theoretical work by Charles H. Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow.
Nonlinear optics (NLO) is the branch of optics that describes the behaviour of light in nonlinear media, that is, media in which the polarization density P responds non-linearly to the electric field E of the light. The non-linearity is typically observed only at very high light intensities (when the electric field of the light is >108 V/m and thus comparable to the atomic electric field of ~1011 V/m) such as those provided by lasers. Above the Schwinger limit, the vacuum itself is expected to become nonlinear. In nonlinear optics, the superposition principle no longer holds.
An optical amplifier is a device that amplifies an optical signal directly, without the need to first convert it to an electrical signal. An optical amplifier may be thought of as a laser without an optical cavity, or one in which feedback from the cavity is suppressed. Optical amplifiers are important in optical communication and laser physics. They are used as optical repeaters in the long distance fiber-optic cables which carry much of the world's telecommunication links.
Mode locking is a technique in optics by which a laser can be made to produce pulses of light of extremely short duration, on the order of picoseconds (10−12 s) or femtoseconds (10−15 s). A laser operated in this way is sometimes referred to as a femtosecond laser, for example, in modern refractive surgery. The basis of the technique is to induce a fixed phase relationship between the longitudinal modes of the laser's resonant cavity. Constructive interference between these modes can cause the laser light to be produced as a train of pulses. The laser is then said to be "phase-locked" or "mode-locked".
Ti:sapphire lasers (also known as Ti:Al2O3 lasers, titanium-sapphire lasers, or Ti:sapphs) are tunable lasers which emit red and near-infrared light in the range from 650 to 1100 nanometers. These lasers are mainly used in scientific research because of their tunability and their ability to generate ultrashort pulses. Lasers based on Ti:sapphire were first constructed and invented in June 1982 by Peter Moulton at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Kerr-lens mode-locking (KLM) is a method of mode-locking lasers via the nonlinear optical Kerr effect. This method allows the generation of pulses of light with a duration as short as a few femtoseconds.
In optics, the Pockels effect, or Pockels electro-optic effect, is a directionally-dependent linear variation in the refractive index of an optical medium that occurs in response to the application of an electric field. It is named after the German physicist Friedrich Carl Alwin Pockels, who studied the effect in 1893. The non-linear counterpart, the Kerr effect, causes changes in the refractive index at a rate proportional to the square of the applied electric field. In optical media, the Pockels effect causes changes in birefringence that vary in proportion to the strength of the applied electric field.
Spontaneous parametric down-conversion is a nonlinear instant optical process that converts one photon of higher energy, into a pair of photons of lower energy, in accordance with the law of conservation of energy and law of conservation of momentum. It is an important process in quantum optics, for the generation of entangled photon pairs, and of single photons.
In physics, terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) is a spectroscopic technique in which the properties of matter are probed with short pulses of terahertz radiation. The generation and detection scheme is sensitive to the sample's effect on both the amplitude and the phase of the terahertz radiation.
Four-wave mixing (FWM) is an intermodulation phenomenon in nonlinear optics, whereby interactions between two or three wavelengths produce two or one new wavelengths. It is similar to the third-order intercept point in electrical systems. Four-wave mixing can be compared to the intermodulation distortion in standard electrical systems. It is a parametric nonlinear process, in that the energy of the incoming photons is conserved. FWM is a phase-sensitive process, in that the efficiency of the process is strongly affected by phase matching conditions.
Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) is a technique for amplifying an ultrashort laser pulse up to the petawatt level, with the laser pulse being stretched out temporally and spectrally, then amplified, and then compressed again. The stretching and compression uses devices that ensure that the different color components of the pulse travel different distances.
Coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy, also called Coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering spectroscopy (CARS), is a form of spectroscopy used primarily in chemistry, physics and related fields. It is sensitive to the same vibrational signatures of molecules as seen in Raman spectroscopy, typically the nuclear vibrations of chemical bonds. Unlike Raman spectroscopy, CARS employs multiple photons to address the molecular vibrations, and produces a coherent signal. As a result, CARS is orders of magnitude stronger than spontaneous Raman emission. CARS is a third-order nonlinear optical process involving three laser beams: a pump beam of frequency ωp, a Stokes beam of frequency ωS and a probe beam at frequency ωpr. These beams interact with the sample and generate a coherent optical signal at the anti-Stokes frequency (ωpr+ωp-ωS). The latter is resonantly enhanced when the frequency difference between the pump and the Stokes beams (ωp-ωS) coincides with the frequency of a Raman resonance, which is the basis of the technique's intrinsic vibrational contrast mechanism.
Potassium titanyl phosphate (KTP) is an inorganic compound with the formula KTiOPO4. It is a white solid. KTP is an important nonlinear optical material that is commonly used for frequency-doubling diode-pumped solid-state lasers such as Nd:YAG and other neodymium-doped lasers.
An optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is a parametric oscillator that oscillates at optical frequencies. It converts an input laser wave with frequency into two output waves of lower frequency by means of second-order nonlinear optical interaction. The sum of the output waves' frequencies is equal to the input wave frequency: . For historical reasons, the two output waves are called "signal" and "idler", where the output wave with higher frequency is the "signal". A special case is the degenerate OPO, when the output frequency is one-half the pump frequency, , which can result in half-harmonic generation when signal and idler have the same polarization.
Raman amplification is based on the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) phenomenon, when a lower frequency 'signal' photon induces the inelastic scattering of a higher-frequency 'pump' photon in an optical medium in the nonlinear regime. As a result of this, another 'signal' photon is produced, with the surplus energy resonantly passed to the vibrational states of the medium. This process, as with other stimulated emission processes, allows all-optical amplification. Optical fiber is today most used as the nonlinear medium for SRS for telecom purposes; in this case it is characterized by a resonance frequency downshift of ~11 THz. The SRS amplification process can be readily cascaded, thus accessing essentially any wavelength in the fiber low-loss guiding windows. In addition to applications in nonlinear and ultrafast optics, Raman amplification is used in optical telecommunications, allowing all-band wavelength coverage and in-line distributed signal amplification.
This is a list of acronyms and other initialisms used in laser physics and laser applications.
Ultrafast laser spectroscopy is a spectroscopic technique that uses ultrashort pulse lasers for the study of dynamics on extremely short time scales. Different methods are used to examine the dynamics of charge carriers, atoms, and molecules. Many different procedures have been developed spanning different time scales and photon energy ranges; some common methods are listed below.
The Vulcan laser is an infrared, 8-beam, petawatt neodymium glass laser at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Central Laser Facility in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. It was the facility's first operational laser.
EKSPLA is a laser manufacturing company based in Lithuania. EKSPLA is known for their lasers and laser systems, as well as other photonics components. The company is supplying their products for scientific, OEM & industrial applications.
A parametric process is an optical process in which light interacts with matter in such a way as to leave the quantum state of the material unchanged. As a direct consequence of this there can be no net transfer of energy, momentum, or angular momentum between the optical field and the physical system. In contrast a non-parametric process is a process in which any part of the quantum state of the system changes.