Stability and transients of cw intracavity singly resonant optical parametric oscillators

Summary form only given. Intracavity frequency conversion is well established as an efficient method of generating cw visible light. The recent demonstrations of intracavity singly resonant optical parametric oscillators (ICSROs) have extended this work to produce watt-level, cw outputs tunable through the infrared. We show here that ICSROs do not suffer from the same problems of instability, though they do exhibit novel transient behavior, and as such represent practical cw sources capable of high output powers and conversion efficiencies. We extend the derivation of the dynamical equations to accommodate a multifrequency laser field that couples through a single frequency, resonant signal field. Our analysis finds that the total laser power is clamped at the OPO threshold.