Highly efficient and high power 2 /spl mu/m generation with PPMgLN OPO

Summary form only given. A DPSSL at the wavelength range of 1-/spl mu/m has achieved high power and highly efficient operation with a good beam quality. This progress of DPSSL and improvement of a wavelength converter are expanding available wavelength range of solid state lasers. In particular, introduction of a periodic poled material such as periodic-poled lithium niobate (PPLN) enhances wavelength conversion efficiency dramatically because of its large effective nonlinear coefficient and walkoff-free characteristics. Recently, we have demonstrated high average output power operation of 1.5-/spl mu/m SRO-OPO based on 1 mm-thickness PPMgLN (MgO doped PPLN). Since MgO doped lithium niobate is a strong material for photorefractive damage, total average output power of as high as 60.3-W was obtained at room temperature condition. In this earlier demonstration, the reflectivities of OPO cavity mirrors were not optimized and the total conversion efficiency was limited as 61-% by back-conversion process. Here, we used a 2-/spl mu/m OPO with optimized cavity mirrors and demonstrated high power and highly efficient OPO operation at the same time.