Qinjun PENG^*, Xiaodong YANG, Xuejun WANG, Aicong GENG, Aiyun YAO and Zuyan XU

Optics Physics Lab, CL06, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100080, China

(Received September 1, 2004; Accepted May 16, 2005; Revised March 28, 2005)

Thermally induced rupture of a nonlinear crystal is the primary limiting factor to the attainment of high average power (HAP) in an optical parametric oscillator (OPO). In this paper, HAP scaling behavior in an OPO is addressed in detail by combining thermally induced phase mismatching with thermally induced rupture. Expressions for the heat generation using a multi-pass model and thermally induced stress are derived and analyzed that can give directions for a HAP–OPO design. When an OPO generates the maximum average output power, the dependence of flaw size on thermo optical material parameters of nonlinear crystals is obtained that is very useful for surface processing, material selection, property improvements of a nonlinear crystal and new HAP nonlinear crystal development.

Key words: parametric oscillators; thermal effects

^*E-mail address: pengqinjun@263.net