Second harmonic generation and laser damage studies in zinc (tris) thiourea sulfate crystals

Summary form only given. Zinc (tris) thiourea sulfate (ZTS) is a semiorganic nonlinear optical (NLO) crystal with a low optical absorption for sub-micron near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths. In the nineties, ZTS drew considerable attention as a second harmonic generation (SHG) crystal for 1064 nm wavelength but the presence of an absorption peak around 1040 nm remained a serious impediment. Using as-grown ZTS crystals and /spl sim/100 fs laser pulses, we measured phase matching angles as a function of NIR wavelengths. We also conducted laser damage studies using 8 ns pulses at 10 Hz repetition rate at 532 and 1064 nm generated from an Nd:YAG laser. We show that for sub-micron NIR, ZTS has an effective d coefficient and a damage threshold comparable to those of broadly used NLO crystals.