Abstract

Intracavity frequency-conversion is well established as an efficient method of generating continuous-wave (cw) visible light. Recent demonstrations, e.g. [1], of intracavity singly-resonant optical parametric oscillators (ICSRO's) have extended this work to produce Watt-level, cw outputs tunable through the infrared. It is well known, however, that at high powers intracavity up-conveision can suffer from dynamic instabilities (the Green Problem), which present design constraints to the power­scaling of such systems. We show here that ICSRO’s do not suffer from the same problems of instability, though do exhibit novel transient behaviour, and as such represent practical cw sources capable of high output powers and conversion efficiencies.

© 1998 IEEE