Abstract
We designed and built an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) that rotates the image of the resonated wave by 90° on each pass ef the cavity. Our goal is to verify the predictions1 of high beam quality from such an OPO even for high pufse energy and large Fresnel number. In an earlier paper2 we demonstrated improved beam quality for small beam diameters in an image-rotating OPO that used a Dove prism to rotate the image. Here we present a new design using a nonplanar ring resonator and demonstrate good beam quality for larger beam diameters. Figure 1 shows the design of our nonplanar ring. The plane of incidence for mirror M2 is the horizontal plane and that for mirror M, is the vertical plane. The halfwave plate in leg L2 maintains the signal wave polarization in the horizontal or extraordinary plane for each cavity pass. The leg lengths and mirror angles are chosen to provide 90° image rotation. Two walkoff compensating crystals are shown but a single crystal should work just as well and our experiments use a single crystal.
© 2002 Optical Society of America
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