SYNCHRONOUSLY PUMPED OPTICAL PARAMETRIC OSCILLATORS WITH LIB3O5

We have constructed a synchronously pumped parametric oscillator that uses temperature-tuned, noncritically phase-matched LiB3O5 as the nonlinear medium. We have synchronously pumped this LiB3O5 parametric oscillator with two different pump sources. The first is a cw mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser that produces 2 W of 100-fs pulsed near 800 nm. Using this pump source, we have generated pulses as short as 40 fs, or as much as 550 mW of average power. We demonstrate the synchronization between the pump and the signal pulses by generating a 100-fs cross correlation. Our second pump source is a novel frequency-doubled diode-pumped Nd:YVO4 laser that produces 2 W of 6-ps pulses at 532 nm. We have generated pulses as short as 270 fs with extracavity dispersion compensation from this all-solid-state system. (C) 1995 Optical Society of America