Evaluation of GdCOB and YCOB frequency conversion, in principal and out of principal plane configurations, for the 1064 nm Nd:YAG laser

Summary form only given. Among all the type of inorganic compounds now developed, 36% of structures based on berate are non-centrosymetric while only 15% of the all reported inorganic structures are non-centrosymetric. Consequently, all the recent NLO material discovered, in the last 5 years, are in majority borate based crystals. The calcium rare earth oxoborate family Ca/sub 4/ReO(BO/sub 3/)/sub 3/ (Re=Gd, Y) are among these recent NLO crystals with a very promising future. This family was first studied with the now well known Ca/sub 4/GdO(BO/sub 3/)/sub 3/ compound named GdCOB. The GdCOB was shown to be an efficient nonlinear optical crystal grown from the melt in a large size. The effective NLO coefficient is about 1 pm/V. It damage threshold is up to 1 Gw/cm2 at 1064 nm (6 ns pulses). The ReCOB family offers a unique opportunity to study the structure-properties relations because of it wide variety of composition. It is possible in this oxoborate family for example to tune the composition in order to get good NLO properties for particular wavelength frequency conversion.