title: Low-noise, high-brightness, tunable source of picosecond pulsed light in the near-infrared and visible.
abstract: We have built a flexible source of picosecond pulsed light in both the near-infrared and visible spectral regions. A photonic crystal fiber (PCF) was pumped with a pulsed 1064 nm fiber laser to generate four-wave mixing (FWM) sidebands at 947 nm and 1213 nm. This process was seeded at the idler wavelength with a tunable diode laser to limit the spectral width of the sidebands to less than 0.5 nm. Subsequently the idler was mixed efficiently with the residual pump in a nonlinear crystal to yield their sum frequency at 567 nm. All three outputs were tunable by adjusting the seed wavelength and all had very low pulse-to-pulse amplitude noise. This technique could be extended to different wavelength ranges by selecting different seed lasers and PCF.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK. pjm36@bath.ac.uk
authors.forename: Peter J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Mosley
authors.forename: Samuel A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Bateman
authors.forename: Laure
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lavoute
authors.forename: William J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Wadsworth
mesh_terms: D017076:Computer-Aided Design; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D005336:Fiber Optic Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*; D007259:Infrared Rays; D007834:Lasers; D008029:Lighting / Q000295:instrumentation*