Fully efficient adiabatic frequency conversion of broadband Ti:sapphire oscillator pulses

Abstract

By adiabatic difference-frequency generation in an aperiodically poled nonlinear crystal-a nonlinear optical analog of rapid adiabatic passage in a two-level atomic system-we demonstrate the conversion of a 110nm band from an octave-spanning Ti:sapphire oscillator to the infrared, spanning 1550 to 2450nm, with near-100% internal conversion efficiency. The experiment proves the principle of complete Landau-Zener adiabatic transfer in nonlinear optical wave mixing. Our implementation is a practical approach to the seeding of high-energy ultrabroadband optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers. © 2012 Optical Society of America.