Modeling and Control of Nonlinear Optical Wavelength Conversion

Abstract

A key issue for high power lasers in general and for high-power OPOs. As that the intense laser light tends to heat the gain medium (i.e. the crystal) as some of the light is absorbed. We therefore developed a numerical model to simulate thermal effects in optical parametric oscillators. First, we implemented a wavelength conversion code using radially-symmetric Hankel transforms to speed up the simulations. Many comparisons of different Hankel and fast Hankel transforms were done to determine which would be the best one to use. Once this was working we then added thermal effects. Because of the tremendously disparate timescales an algorithm was developed to accelerate the numerical simulation of the thermal evolution. The results of these studies also allowed several potential improvements to this acceleration algorithm to be identified. Note that without specific algorithms to speed up the simulations, numerical run times would be prohibitive.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 14, 2001
Accession Number
ADA419572

Entities

People

  • Gregory G. Luther
  • William L. Kath

Organizations

  • Northwestern University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Continuous Waves
  • Conversion
  • Crystals
  • Engineering
  • Geometry
  • Guided Missiles
  • Lasers
  • Materials
  • Mathematics
  • Nonlinear Optics
  • Optical Fibers
  • Optical Materials
  • Optics
  • Oscillators
  • Simulations

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Adaptive Control and Estimation with Uncertainty in Dynamic Systems.
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy