Performance studies of high-average-power picosecond optical parametric generation and amplification in MgO:PPLN at 80 MHz.

We report on performance studies of high-average-power single-pass picosecond optical parametric generation (OPG) and amplification (OPA) tunable near 2 µm in MgO:PPLN pumped by an Yb-fiber laser at 1.064 µm and 80 MHz pulse repetition rate. The simple setup based on two identical crystals, and without the need for an intermediate delay line for synchronization, delivers up to 6.3 W of average power at an overall conversion efficiency of ∼50% and is tunable across 1902-2415 nm. We present systematic characterization of OPG and OPA stages to compare their performance and investigate the effect of parametric generation in the high-gain limit, enabling high output power and full-width-half-maximum (FWHM) spectral bandwidths as large as 189 nm. The OPG-OPA output exhibits excellent passive power stability better than 0.3% rms and central wavelength stability better than 0.03% rms over 1 hour, in high spatial beam quality with M2<2. The OPG output pulses have duration of 5.2 ps with a FWHM spectral bandwidth of 117 nm at 2123 nm, resulting in a time-bandwidth product of ΔτΔν∼40, indicating ∼4 times temporal compression compared to the input pump pulses. Theoretical simulations confirm the effect of pump beam divergence on the observed shift in wavelength tuning with respect to temperature, while the exponential gain in the parametric process is identified as playing a key role in the resulting pulse compression.