Spectral compression by phase doubling in second harmonic generation

Abstract

In second harmonic generation, the phase of the optical field is doubled which has important implication. Here the phase doubling effect is utilized to solve a long-standing challenge in power scaling of single frequency laser. When a (-π/2, π/2) binary phase modulation is applied to a single frequency seed laser to broaden the spectrum and suppress the stimulated Brillouin scattering in high power fiber amplifier, the second harmonic of the phase-modulated laser will return to single frequency, because the (-π/2, π/2) modulation is doubled to (-π, π) for the second harmonic. A compression rate as high as 95% is demonstrated in the experiment limited by the electronic bandwidth of the setup, which can be improved with optimized devices.

7 pages, 5 figures