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A Sensitive Scheme to Observe Weak Photo-Refraction Effects in Some Nonlinear Optical Crystals Pumped by Ultrashort Optical Pulses

Xu Shi-Xiang1, Gao Yan-Xia1, Cai Hua2 and Li Jing-Zhen1

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FUNDAMENTAL AREAS OF PHENOMENOLOGY (INCLUDING APPLICATIONS)

We present a sensitive scheme, for the first time to our knowledge, to observe photo-refraction (PR) effects in some nonlinear optical crystals, e.g. β-BBO, LBO and BIBO, pumped by an intense ultrashort laser pulse chain. These quite weak effects are "amplified" by sensitive cw intracavity loss modulation. Our results show that they are repeatable and are dependent on pumping power and wavelength, and their response time ranges from tens of seconds to several minutes. The recorded dynamical transitions between the self-focusing to the self-defocusing (or vice versa) induced by the PR effect may be critically important for us to give more insight into the stability of some cascade nonlinear frequency conversions, e.g. multi-stage optical parametric amplifiers.


PACS

42.65.Hw Phase conjugation; photorefractive and Kerr effects

42.65.Jx Beam trapping, self-focusing and defocusing; self-phase modulation

42.65.Yj Optical parametric oscillators and amplifiers

42.65.Ky Frequency conversion; harmonic generation, including higher-order harmonic generation

42.70.Mp Nonlinear optical crystals

42.65.Re Ultrafast processes; optical pulse generation and pulse compression

Subjects

Optics, quantum optics and lasers

Dates

Issue 11 (November 2009)

Received 2 March 2009



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