Dual-cavity DROPO - an ideal single-mode source for nonlinear spectroscopy

Summary form only given. With the appearance of periodically poled crystals, tremendous developments were recently obtained in the field of continuous-wave (cw) optical parametric oscillators. However, the low power delivered by cw sources is not appropriate to address the problems of nonlinear spectroscopy and open air pollutant species detection. Pulsed OPOs seem to be a good alternative for such applications since high output power can be delivered over a large domain of wavelengths from rugged and compact devices. Nonetheless, the broad spectral bandwidth of nanosecond-duration pulsed OPO remains a serious drawback for spectroscopic purposes. In this paper, we propose a new alternative, based on a dual-cavity doubly resonant OPO (DROPO).Using two separate cavities allows us to prevent oscillation with imperfect mode overlap.