Proceedings Article | 9 December 2014
KEYWORDS: Crystals, Laser crystals, Ultraviolet radiation, Nonlinear crystals, Temperature metrology, Second-harmonic generation, High power lasers, Laser applications, Laser processing, Optical simulations
266nm UV laser has a wide range of applications in many fields, such as laser medical treatment, laser processing,
precision measure and other applications for the reason of its advantages in wavelength, small diffraction effects, high single-photon energy, and high resolution and so on. BBO crystals absorb parts of the fundamental laser energy and second harmonic laser energy are unavoidable, and thus the temperature raise, so that the existing crystal phase matching conditions change, resulting in phase mismatching in the high-power frequency doubling, greatly influence the 266nm UV laser conversion efficiency. To further study the effect of phase mismatching to conversion efficiency, and improve the conversion efficiency, output power and other output characteristics of 266nm laser, the article mainly describe from the following three aspects. Firstly, took the use of three-dimensional nonlinear crystal temperature distribution which is obtained, the process of BBO crystal thermal-induced phase mismatching is analyzed. Secondly, based on frequency doubling theory, the effects of the thermal-induced phase mismatching affected of conversion in crystals are analyzed. Combining with the phase mismatching of the three-dimensional distributions, the fourth harmonic conversion efficiency with thermal phase mismatching changes of BBO 266nm UV laser are simulated for the first time. Thirdly, by using MATLAB software, the effects of phase mismatching to conversion efficiency in crystal for different waist radius, 532nm laser power and the fundamental beam quality are simulated. The results indicate a good physical interpretation of reasons of high power laser frequency doubling system. It shows that the model established explains the reason of the reduction of conversion efficiency, output power and the beam quality excellently. All results make a leading sense to the research on the compensating of the phase mismatching and on the improvement of conversion efficiency.
