Self-diffraction through cascaded second-order frequency-mixing effects in b-barium borate

The large effective third-order nonlinearity produced by cascaded second-order processes is evidenced by the spatial self-diffraction of two beams interacting in a b-barium borate crystal. In this configuration, both the real and imaginary parts of the induced third-order susceptibility play a role, and the effect reaches its maximum around the phase-matching conditio

High power, subpicosecond, 750-1770 nm tunable pulses from travelling wave parametric generator

Transform limited subpicosecond pulses have been obtained by parametric conversion of the second harmonic of a short pulse generated by a Nd:glass laser system. The arrangement consists of a KDP followed by a BBO respectively with type II and type I phase-matching, pumped in a travelling wave configuration without any spectral selecting element between them. It provides tunability from 750 to 1770 nm with pulses as short as 0.6 ps. Pulse energies above 50 \u3bcJ, with a total conversion efficiency of 13%, have been achieve