Electronically and rapidly tunable fiber-integrable optical parametric oscillator for nonlinear microscopy

Brinkmann M, Janfrüchte S, Hellwig T, Dobner S, Fallnich C

Abstract

We present a fiber-based optical parametric oscillator (FOPO) pumped by a fiber-coupled laser diode. The FOPO consisted of a photonic crystal fiber to convert the pump pulses via four-wave mixing and a dispersive resonator formed by a single-mode fiber. Via dispersion filtering, output pulses with a bandwidth of about 3 nm, a temporal duration of about 8 ps and a pulse energy of up to 22 nJ could be generated. By changing the repetition frequency of the pump laser diode by about ô1 kHz, the wavelength of the output pulses could be tuned between 1130 and 1310 nm within 8 μs, without the need to change the length of the resonator. Therewith, the FOPO should especially be suited for hyperspectral imaging, while its all-electronic control constitutes a promising approach to a turnkey and alignment-free light source.