High-power, widely tunable, picosecond coherent source from optical parametric amplification in barium borate

Abstract

We report the performance of a type-I barium borate optical parametric amplifier pumped by 15 ps, 355 nm laser pulses. We show that it is possible to obtain narrowband (≂3 Å), high-energy (≥200 μJ), widely tunable (0.4–2 μm) picosecond pulses with a maximum pump-to-signal energy conversion better than 30%.