Characteristics of high repetition rate wavelength tunable solid state laser for real time laser monitoring system

Maruyama, Yoichiro; Kato, Masaaki

As a tunable laser source for the study of real time LIDAR techique to detect some trace impurities in atmosphere, a dye laser has been employed. As a dye laser is difficult to handle, it is considered that the dye laser may not be used as a practical light source. A tunable solid stat laser composed of an optical parametricc oscillaotr (OPO) which has a wider wavelength range is one of the promising tunable light sources, however, there is no OPO with high repetition rate and large pulse energy. Therefore high repetition rate lasing characteristics of OPO are studied. In this experiment, -Barium Borate (BBO) crystal is utilized as a gain meduim of OPO and pumped by the second harmonic of Nd:YAG laser with the pulse repetition rate of 0.5 kHz. The threshold pumping peak power for BBO-OPO is around 16 MW/cm. Maximum OPO average output power of around 5.4 W is obtained with the power conversion efficiency of around 45%. The averege output power of OPO is increasing with the pumping power and undesirable thermal effects are not observed.