Relaxation oscillation suppression in continuous-wave intracavity optical parametric oscillators.

We report a solution to the long standing problem of the occurrence of spontaneous and long-lived bursts of relaxation oscillations which occur when a continuous-wave optical parametric oscillator is operated within the cavity of the parent pump-laser. By placing a second nonlinear crystal within the pump-wave cavity for the purpose of second-harmonic-generation of the pump-wave the additional nonlinear loss thereby arising due to up-conversion effectively suppresses the relaxation oscillations with very little reduction in down-converted power.