KEYWORDS: Pulse signals, Education and training, Analog to digital converters, Dispersion, Ultrafast phenomena, Repetition frequency, Single mode fibers, Nyquist pulse, Microwave radiation, Photonics systems
An optimization method to improve the spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of photonic sampling without sacrificing the signal-to-noise and distortion ratio (SINAD) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. It is realized by managing the chirp in the generated ultrashort optical pulse train by simply changing the group velocity dispersion (GVD) of the dispersion compensation module (DCM) in the cavity-less ultra-short optical pulse source. In the simulation, the SFDRs of the photonic sampling for the input signals in the frequency range of 0.1 GHz to 40.1 GHz are significantly improved with residual linear chirp in the optical pulse train compared with the situation that the chirp is completely compensated. In the experiment, a 10.1 GHz single-tone microwave signal is sampled and the SFDR is improved by 10.95 dB owing to the residual chirp in the optical pulse train. In addition, the SINAD is improved by 2.76 dB even though the power of the fundamental frequency signal is slightly reduced. The proposed scheme can also be applied to photonic sampling ADCs based on other optical pulse sources, which is favorable for alleviating the limitation from the nonlinearity of the electro-optic amplitude modulator.
The effect of different interpolation methods on imaging quality of swept-source optical coherence tomography (SSOCT) is analyzed. A 1310nm SS-OCT system is built for imaging. Time-domain interpolation method based on spectral phase is used for resampling. The interpolation methods include piecewise linear interpolation, piecewise quadratic parabola interpolation, piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation and piecewise cubic spline interpolation. The image of the plane mirror, human skin and eyes are compared by the above four interpolation methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the piecewise cubic spline interpolation has the best image quality, which is the smoothest and has the lowest noise.
KEYWORDS: Analog electronics, Signal processing, Signal to noise ratio, Signal attenuation, Modulation, Microwave radiation, Digital photography, Calibration, Nonlinear optics, Interference (communication), Microwave photonics
A linearization scheme in the digital domain for photonic sampling analog-to-digital converter (PS-ADC) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated, where a single-output Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) is used for photonic sampling instead of a dual-output MZM (DOMZM) in the traditional schemes. After frequency response calibration of the sampled signal in the digital domain, the optimal direct current (DC) component and the coefficient of sine function are found, and arcsine algorithm is performed to implement the linearization of PS-ADC. The theoretical results indicate that, compared with the differential and arcsine operation method generally employed in PS-ADC, the proposed scheme is facile to implement and decreases the system overhead. The feasibility of the scheme is verified by simulation and experiment. In the proof-of-concept experiment, for a single-tone microwave signal at 100 MHz with a modulation index of 0.45π, the second-order harmonic is suppressed below the noise floor, the third-order harmonic suppression ratio is enhanced by 17.14 dB, and the significant improvement in SINAD is equal to 7.91 dB.
In this paper, an injection-locked optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) based on frequency conversion filtering process is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The kernel of the proposed scheme is that injection locking technique is employed to obtain a high side-mode suppression ratio, while the delay-matched frequency conversion filtering process is used to eliminate the phase noise influence of the local oscillation (LO) signal. In the proof-of-concept experiment, a single-mode oscillation at 10 GHz is realized, where the frequency of the LO signal was set to be 10.07 GHz and an intermediate frequency bandpass filter with a center frequency of 70 MHz and a 3-dB bandwidth of 50 kHz is employed. The side-mode suppression ratio and the phase noise are measured to be 76 dB and -123.5dBc/Hz@10kHz, respectively
A linear frequency modulation (LFM)-Costas waveform generation scheme is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on a Fourier domain mode locking (FDML) optoelectronic oscillator (OEO). The FDML OEO is established based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effect, where the Costas-coded probe light is realized by employing an open-loop voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) via electro-optic frequency shift. In the experiment, an LFM-Costas waveform with a 12-bit Costas sequence, a chirp rate of 39.234 MHz/μs and a period of 20.390 μs is generated in the frequency range of 8.020 GHz to 8.820 GHz. The generated LFM-Costas waveform has good pulse-to-pulse coherence according to the correlation results, and has been used to detect two targets with a distance difference of 0.30 m and 0.20 m
A broadband photonic time-stretch analog-to-digital converter (PTS-ADC) based on complementary parallel singlesideband (SSB) modulation architecture is proposed and experimentally demonstrated by using a dissipative soliton-based passively mode-locked fiber laser (MLL). The experiment results indicate that the proposed scheme can increase the effective input analog bandwidth and remove the pulse-envelope-induced distortion. The signal-to-noise ratio of the photonic time stretch system can be guaranteed by using the dissipative soliton-based MLL. Therefore, a broadband PTSADC with input frequency of 2GHz to 25 GHz is constructed and an ENOB of beyond 3 bits is achieved.
Publisher’s Note: This paper, originally published on 12 March 2020 was replaced with a corrected/revised version on 10 April 2020. If you downloaded the original PDF but are unable to access the revision, please contact SPIE Digital Library Customer Service for assistance.
To implement Real-time segmentation for polarization-modulated 3D imaging system, an efficient segmentation method for multi-dimensional information fusion is proposed in this paper. Conventional 3D imaging Lidar systems use an avalanche photodiode (APD) array detector to measure time-of-flight of each pixel in the scene. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a super-resolution 3D imaging framework based on a new imaging sensor EMCCD (Electron Multiplying Charge Coupled Device). Due to its low bandwidth characteristics, the electro-optic modulators are applied to implement temporal (range) resolution, and meanwhile act as a fast shutter with sub-nanosecond-level. Consequently, range-gated 3D imaging can be achieved to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance in our framework. With dual EMCCDs structure, the depth map and intensity image can be reconstructed from adding the two modulated images. The iterative threshold algorithm method is applied to the target segmentation of high-resolution images, and image morphological erosion algorithm are used to improve the segmentation accuracy. The target’s pixel coordinate position obtained by image segmentation is mapped to 3D point cloud data to get the segmented target point cloud data. Experimental results show that the system can achieve high-precision flash imaging. Meanwhile, the segmentation method has a great improvement in time efficiency compared with traditional clustering algorithm, and can reduce the under-segmentation error rate. Ultimately, we found that the imaging method showed outstanding performance on high-precision imaging with an error less than 0.1m in a wide field-of-view of 0.9mrad. And the segmentation of target takes only 560ms.
Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is an extension of OCT and provide the polarization information of biological tissues. Generally, the polarization-diversity detection of PS-OCT is free-space type, which is usually very complicated and reduces Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). We built a polarization depth-encoding PS-OCT system with fiber-based polarization-diversity detection unit. The PS-OCT system was based on swept source OCT operating at 1310 nm, which has 100 kHz axial scan rates. The polarization depth-encoding was implemented by polarization-dependent spectral delay by combining of a polarization beam splitter (PBS) and two quarter-wavelength plates. The fiber-based polarization-diversity detection unit was implemented by the combination of fiber based polarization beam splitters and polarization controllers, which was used to calibrate the input light polarization of the fiberbased polarization beam splitters (FPBS). The acquired spectral signals were processed with standard Fourier domain OCT procedure including background subtraction, numerical dispersion compensation, zero padding and Fourier transforming. Jones Matrix Measurement method was adopted to process the Fourier transformed complex-valued OCT signals to compute the information of polarization properties of sample. And we measured zero-order, quarter-wave plate at 1310nm wavelength and zero-order, half-wave plate at 514nm wavelength to verify the accuracy of the system. We also obtained the image of human’s skin of fingertip. This PS-OCT system with fiber-based polarization-diversity detection unit can be obtained from standard swept source OCT easily, and can be further widely used in biomedical applications such as correlating burn depth and measuring the birefringence of the retinal nerve fiber layer.
A novel optical spectrum compression scheme based on time-dependent filtering is proposed and demonstrated. The spectrum compression is realized by using nonlinear polarization rotation effect to achieve power-dependent filtering of a chirped soliton pulse. In the experiment, a single-stage spectrum compression unit based on the proposed scheme is employed in the soliton self-frequency shift-based optical quantization system to improve the quantization resolution. The experimental results show that an average output spectrum width of 1.5 nm is obtained using the proposed scheme, which is 68% of that using the traditional comb-like fiber scheme. In addition, the quantization resolution using the proposed scheme is 5.1 bits, which is 0.6 bit higher than that using a single-stage spectrum compression unit based on the traditional comb-like fiber structure.
We present a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber ring laser with near-zero net cavity dispersion using the nonlinear polarization rotation technique. The compact all-fiber laser is constructed by utilizing an optical integrated component. Through optimizing the cavity dispersion and nonlinearity, high-peak-power near-transform-limited pulses with a spectral width beyond the gain bandwidth limitation can be directly obtained from the laser. Resultant output pulses have a pulse duration of 62 fs, a 3-dB spectral width of 66.3 nm, and a maximum peak power of 7.9 kW. Numerical simulations reproduce the generation of sub-100-fs pulses in the laser. The pulse-shaping mechanism can be attributed to simultaneous dispersion and nonlinearity management in the cavity, which is distinct from that in the stretched-pulse lasers.
A kind of stochastic gradient descent method of self-adaptive learning rate is proposed in this thesis. This method is based on the optimization algorithm Nesterov accelerated gradient (NAG). First second derivative approximation of cost function is executed, then the final update orientation is corrected through self-adaptive learning rate, and the convergence of the method is analyzed theoretically. This method required no manual adjustment of the learning rate and is robust in the selection of noise gradient information and hyper-parameters, featuring high computation efficiency and small memory overhead. Finally, a comparison is made between this method and other stochastic gradient descent methods through MNIST digital classification task, and the experiment result showed that Adan worked well with the faster rate of convergence and is better than other stochastic gradient descent optimization methods.
We report on ultrafast-pulse generation in an erbium-doped fiber ring laser mode-locked by a graphene/WS2 van der Waals heterostructure saturable absorber. Atomic-layered WS2 is first synthesized on SiO2/Si substrate by the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method, and then graphene/WS2 heterostructure is fabricated by transferring graphene onto the CVD-grown layered WS2. Taking advantage of excellent saturable absorption properties of the fabricated graphene/WS2 heterostructure, stable soliton pulses are successfully generated in the laser with a 3-dB spectral width of 2.3 nm and a pulse duration of 1.12 ps. Numerical simulations reproduce the mode-locked pulse emission in the experiment. Our research provides a new insight for tailoring versatile two-dimensional heterostructures so as to develop ultrafast photonic applications.
We present a numerical investigation of dissipative-soliton-resonance (DSR) generation in an all-normal-dispersion Ybdoped fiber laser mode-locked by a real saturable absorber (SA). In the simulation model, the SA includes both the saturable absorption and excited-state absorption (ESA) effects. The intra-cavity pulse evolution is numerically simulated with different transmission functions of SA. When omitting the ESA effect, the transmissivity of SA increases monotonically with the input pulse power. The noise-like pulse (NLP) operation in the cavity is obtained at high pump power, which is attributed to the spectral filtering effect. When the ESA effect is activated, higher instantaneous power part of pulse encounters larger loss induced by SA, causing that the pulse peak power is clamped at a certain fixed value. With increasing pump, the pulse starts to extend in the time domain while the pulse spectrum is considerably narrowed. In this case, the NLP operation state induced by the spectral filtering effect is avoided and the DSR is generated. Our simulation results indicate that the ESA effect in the SA plays a dominant role in generating the DSR pulses, which will be conducive to comprehending the mechanism of DSR generation in passively mode-locked fiber lasers.
We demonstrate that two kinds of 2D nanomaterials are employed as saturable absorbers to realize infrared pulsed fiber lasers at 1.5 μm and 3 μm, respectively. Mode-locked optical pulses are achieved at 1.5 μm erbium-doped fiber lasers by using multilayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). In addition, Q-switched fiber lasers are realized at 3 μm region by using topological insulator: Bi2Te3. Experimental proofs are provided. Our work reveals that 2D nanomaterials like MoS2 and TI: Bi2Te3 are absolutely a class of promising and reliable saturable absorbers for optical pulse generation at infrared waveband.
Mid-infrared pulsed fiber laser with centered wavelength from 2 to 5 μm have attracted substantial attention owing to their potential applications in defence, laser microsurgery, material processing, nonlinear frequency conversion, etc. We demonstrated our recent achievements at 3 μm pulsed fiber lasers by utilizing Q-switching method. Firstly, a cascaded dual wavelength actively Q-switched Ho3+-doped ZBLAN fiber was reported by inserting an external electrically driven acoustic-optical modulator (AOM) into the cavity. The 3.0 μm and 2.07 μm pulse trains were achieved with a μs level time delay corresponding to the pulse energy of 29 μJ and 7 μJ, pulse duration of 380 ns and 260 ns, respectively. The narrower pulse width in this case compared to that in passively Q-switched fiber lasers can be attributed to the much higher modulation depth of AOM. Using a reversely designed semiconductor saturable mirror (SESAM) as the saturable absorber (SA), we presented a passively Q-switched Ho3+-doped ZBLAN fiber laser operating at ~2971 nm, the obtained maximum pulse energy of 6.65 μJ only limited by the maximum pump power was also the highest level from passively Q-switched fiber lasers at this wavelength range, and corresponding pulse repetition rate and duration were 47.6 kHz and 1.68 μs, respectively. Then using a Fe2+: ZnSe crystal with an initial transmission of 69 % as the SA, a passively Q-switched Ho3+-doped ZBLAN fiber laser operating at 2970.3 nm was also achieved. The obtained pulse duration and repetition rate were 1.92 μs and 62.74 kHz, respectively with an output power of 266 mW and a pulse energy of 4.24 μJ. The further performance improvements were possible because they were just limited by the maximum pump power. To sum up, the above achievements would be beneficial for further development of mid-infrared pulsed fiber lasers.
All-optical sampling attracts considerable attention due to its crucial applications in high-speed optical analog-to-digital conversion. We successfully demonstrated an all-optical sampling scheme using nonlinear polarization rotation in a single semiconductor optical amplifier at 40 GSa/s and 160 GSa/s, respectively. The scheme requires only a single semiconductor optical amplifier and has low power consumption, which shows much potential for the high-speed optical analog-to-digital conversion.
We numerically investigate the output characteristics of dissipative solitons (DSs) in a thulium-doped fiber ring laser mode-locked by a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM). It is shown that DSs could be formed with the SESAM acting as a mode-locker and a filtering-equivalent component. The pump power, together with the net-cavity dispersion, determines the properties of the generated DSs. The numerical results qualitatively match with previously reported experimental observations. The pulse compression of the generated DSs is numerically demonstrated by using a segment of single-mode fiber with anomalous dispersion as an external pulse compressor. The corresponding compressed pulses have a minimum duration of 450 fs.
All-optical sampling attracts considerable attention due to its crucial applications in high-speed optical analog-to-digital conversion. We present an all-optical sampling scheme using a single semiconductor optical amplifier. In the experiment, 40 GSa/s all-optical sampling for 2.5 GHz analog optical signal is successfully demonstrated with commercially available fiber-pigtailed components. The all-optical sampling shows a fundamental conversion efficiency of 1.35 and a total harmonic distortion of 2.01% at the operating power of 5 mW. Our scheme requires only one semiconductor optical amplifier and has low power consumption, which shows much potential for the high-speed optical analog-to-digital conversion.
We report on the experimental observation of sideband generation in a passively mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser.
The fiber laser has a conventional ring-cavity configuration for passive mode locking based on nonlinear polarization
rotation. Self-starting and stable mode-locking operation is easily achieved in the laser. The output soliton pulses have a
duration of about 248 fs and a repetition rate of 13.7 MHz at 1565-nm wavelength. Detailed pulse dynamics of the laser
is measured under different operation conditions. Dip-type sidebands are observed on the soliton spectra of the laser,
which have clearly different characteristics to those of the conventional Kelly sidebands. The soliton operation of the
fiber laser is numerically simulated based on the coupled Ginzburg-Landau equations. The simulation results are
consistent with the experimental observations, which confirm that dip-type spectral sidebands can appear on the soliton
spectra of a uniform soliton-emission fiber laser.
We present a numerical investigation of nonlinear propagation of chirp-free femtosecond pulses at 1550-nm wavelength
in a nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with anomalous dispersion. The PCF has a second-order dispersion of - 8.67
×104 fs2/m, third-order dispersion of 2.8 x 105 fs3/m and nonlinear coefficient of 11 W-1km-1 at 1550 nm. The simulation
results show that efficient spectral compression of unchirped ultrashort pulses is induced in PCF when the input pulse
parameters satisfy the condition 0.6< N<0.7for the soliton number N. It is found that the compressed spectral width is
strongly dependent on the initial peak power and propagation length of the incident pulse. A compression factor up to 7
can be achieved. With the PCF, efficient spectral compression can take place in the wavelength range of 1530 ~ 1570 nm
covering the C-band. This spectral-compression scheme offers much promise for laser spectroscopy, optical information
technologies and high-power fiber-laser systems.
We present the design of a 2×2 photonic switch operating at 1.55-μm wavelength using electro-optic (EO) polymer
waveguides. A Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is used to implement the proposed switch in which two identical
2×2 multimode interference (MMI) couplers are connected by two identical parallel single mode waveguides (two MZI
arms). These two single-mode waveguides with electrodes allow modulating the phase difference between the two MZI
arms based on the EO effect. In the proposed switch, the EO polymer, IPC-E/polysulfone, is used for the core layer of
optical waveguides. UV15 and NOA61 are employed for the lower and upper cladding layers, respectively. The singlemode
waveguide structure and 2×2 MMI coupler have been designed and analyzed for the EO switch. Device
performance has been simulated using the beam propagation method. It is found that the switch performance is most
sensitive to the MMI width and less sensitive to the MMI length. Optimized structure has been obtained for the 2×2
polymeric EO switch, which has a crosstalk level better than -25 dB and insertion loss lower than -1.8 dB. This
performance makes the switch a potential candidate for practical use in photonic systems.
We present an investigation of spectral dynamics of an ultrashort-pulse Er-doped fiber laser mode-locked by a
semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM). The SESAM used has a saturable absorption modulation depth of
18%, a saturation fluence of 70 μJ/cm2 and a relaxation time of 10 ps at a wavelength of 1550 nm. Detailed pulse
dynamics of the laser are measured at different pumping levels, and the laser operation is linked to the characteristics of
the SESAM. It is observed that, as the pump power is increased, the laser operation changes from cw lasing, to self-Q
switching, Q-switched mode-locking, and then cw mode-locking. Self-starting and stable mode-locking operation is
achieved at a repetition rate of 12 MHz. The pulses with a width of 650 fs are produced at 1562-nm wavelength with a
pump power of 80 mW, and the corresponding spectral width is about 5.0 nm (FWHM). Based on the complex
Ginzburg-Landau equation, self-starting mode-locking process in the fiber laser is simulated, which confirms that
ultrashort pulses can be achieved. The calculated spectral characteristics of the mode-locked pulses are consistent with
the experimental observations.
A novel all-optical high speed sampling method using nonlinear polarization rotation (NPR) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is proposed in this paper. Using the carrier rate equation in a SOA for the propagation of an optical pulse, a model is proposed to describe the relationship between the polarization rotating angles of probe light and the pump light power. Meantime, affection introduced by the initial polarization of the probe light, as well as the injected current of the SOA is studied. The numerical results indicated that the initial polarization of the probe light affects the transfer curve between the output light power of probe light and the pump light power, and the injected current of SOA could affect the linearly dynamic range and the rise slope of the transfer curve. In order to obtain suitable slope and larger linear dynamic range, the parameters are optimized. The primarily simulated results indicated that the pump light power is not more than 1mW. It is also shown that the all-optical sampling mentioned in this paper has promoting potential to improve the sampling rate at hundreds GS/s and needs considerable lower optical power than others.
The microstructure with high fidelity is very important while being used as micro-optical component, because the
performance tightly depends on the profile quality of microstructure. Optical lithography method based on thick film
resist plays an increasing important role in fabrication for microstructure. However, the profile quality of the
microstructure is greatly affected by process parameters adopted in the experiment. In this paper, the effect of
illumination wavelength, gap distance and absorption coefficient on the profile quality after development has been
simulated, analyzed and discussed in detail, by using the model for thick film lithography. The simulated results show
that these process parameters have a great impact on the profile quality of microstructures, which it is helpful for process
optimization and profile control of thick film photolithography.
The refractive nonlinearity is measured in several nonlinear optical crystals using the Z-scan technique with femtosecond pulses at 780-nm wavelength. The crystals studied include KTiOPO4, KTiOAsO4 (beta) BaB2O4, LiB3O5 and LiNbO3:MgO, which are extensively used for ultrashort- pulse second-harmonic generation and optical parametric oscillation. The nonlinear refractive index n2 in these crystals is determined to be in the range from 10-16 to 10-15 cm2/W. No two-photon absorption is observed. The experimental results are compared with two-parabolic band model for the bound electronic Kerr nonlinearity. It is found that the measured n2 values in (beta) BaB2O4 and LiB3O5 are one order of magnitude smaller than those of LiNbO3:MgO, KtiOAsO4,KtiOPO4, which is in agreement with the theoretical prediction.
TiO2/organically modified silane (ORMOSIL) optical waveguide thin films have been prepared at low temperature by the sol-gel technique by using y- Glycidoxypropyltrimethoxysilane and tetrapropylorthotitanate as precursors. Atomic force microscopy has been used to characterize the morphology and structural properties of the waveguide films. Waveguide properties of these composite thin films on III-V compound semiconductor substrates such as their refractive index, thickness, and propagation loss have been studied. It was experimentally demonstrated that grating structures could easily be fabricated for these composite thin films by using the embossing technique and we have successfully fabricated the grating by this method without baking. It was found that this method is specifically useful for the fabrication of diffractive grating and optical planar waveguides on sol-gel derived glass film coated on temperature sensitive substrates such as III-V compound semiconductors. As a preliminary result, the ridge waveguide and grating with a period of 1.102 micrometer and depth of 57.2 nm have been successfully fabricated.
We report the preparation of sol-gel derived planar waveguides from high titanium content hybrid materials. By incorporating organic molecules into the inorganic TiO2- SiO2 sol-gel glass matrix, porous-free waveguide films are obtained with low temperature heat treatment. The single spin-on thickness is measured to be more than 1.7 micrometers , enough to support light guiding and the refractive index of the film is found to depend on the heat treatment temperature. We also studied the microstructural and optical properties of the waveguide films using atomic force microscopy, ellipsometry, thermal gravimetric analysis, and UV-visible spectroscopy. Based on these experimental results, we found that heat-treatment at a temperature about 100 degrees C is sufficient to produce a relatively dense film with high transmission in the visible and near IR range. We believe that this process is very useful for the fabrication of passive photonic circuits on temperature sensitive substrates such as III-V compound semiconductors. Meanwhile, it has also been noted that a purely inorganic and crack-free silica-titan films could be obtained after baking the hybrid material film at 500 degrees C or higher.
We present an investigation of third-order optical nonlinearity in surface modified PbS and CdxPb1-xS nanoparticles using the Z-scan technique with femtosecond laser pulses at 780-nm wavelength. The samples include PbS nanoparticles in microemulsion with PbS concentration range from 0.3-2.5 X 10-3 M and CdxPb1-xS nanoparticles in microemulsion with x from 0 to 1. An extended Z-scan theory based on the Huygens- Fresnel princeps is employed to extract the nonlinear refraction index from the experimental Z-scan data with a large nonlinear phase shift. The nonlinear refractive index in PbS nanoparticle microemulsion is found to increase linearly with PbS concentration between 0.3 X 10-3 and 1.9 X 10-3 M. The highest concentration microemulsion gives a nonlinear refractive index of 1.8 X 10-11 cm2/W, which is approximately 4 orders of magnitude higher than those of commercially available bulk semiconductors, such as ZnS and CdS, measured at the same conditions. In CdxPb1-xS nanoparticles, Cd0.33Pb0.67S exhibits relatively larger refractive nonlinearity. For all samples, nonlinear absorption remained unmeasureable up to 0.9 GW/cm2. The observed large refractive nonlinearity in these nanoparticles may mainly be attributed to the optical Stark effect and contribution from the surface-trapped states in the nanoparticles.
We present our investigation of two-photon absorption and self-focusing in second-harmonic-generation crystals on a picosecond 532-nm-wavelength beam using the z-scan technique. By measuring the crystal transmittance as a function of the crystal position with respect to the focus, the two-photon absorption coefficients were determined to be 0.041 plus or minus 0.008, 0.10 plus or minus 0.02, and 0.24 plus or minus 0.06 cm/GW for KTPA, KTA, and LiNbO3, respectively. With inserting an aperture in front of the detector that recorded the transmitted laser pulse energy, self-focusing effects manifested themselves in the z scans on the three crystals at input irradiances of higher than a few GW/cm2. The quantitative data confirm that the optical Kerr nonlinearity should be responsible for the observed self-focusing and n2 equals (4.6 plus or minus 0.9), 3.6 plus or minus 0.7), and 5.3 plus or minus 1.0) multiplied by 10-6 cm2GW in KTP, KTA and LiNbO3, respectively. The microscopic origin of the measured n2 can be understood in terms of bound electronic effects. The theoretical predictions are in agreement with our measurements. Finally, effects of the observed refractive nonlinearity on laser-induced damage are discussed.
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