Blue-light generating femtosecond wavelength-tunable non-collinear optical parametric amplifier

Abstract

The present invention discloses a means of the generation of tunable femtosecond pulses from 380 nm to 465 nm near the degenerate point of a 405-nm pumped type-I BBO non-collinearly phase-matched optical parametric amplifier (NOPA). The tunable UV/blue radiation is obtained from sum frequency generation (SFG) between the OPA output and the residual fundamental beam at 810-nm and cascaded second harmonic generation (SHG) of OPA. With a pumping energy of 75 mJ at 405 nm, the optical conversion efficiency from the pump to the tunable SFG is more than 5% and the efficiency of SHG of the OPA is about 2%.