Abstract
Periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) based wavelength-tunable lasers have numerous applications. The applications of PPLN tunable light sources are desired in various fields, such as remote pollution detection, laser projector, and spectroscopy. The accomplishment of this work is the demonstration of fabricating a distributed feedback structure in a PPLN-based laser oscillator by using the two-photon photorefractive writing scheme. The visible light sources are also desired in plenty of applications, such as outdoor laser show, laser bacon, color display, and so on.Distributed feedback (DFB) Laser has been proposed in 1972. The advantages of a DFB laser include narrow linewidth, compact size, and simple design. A distributed feedback PPLN optical parametric oscillator (DFB PPLN OPO) is a novel laser device. The design of DFB PPLN OPO combines the distributed feedback theory and quasi-phase-matching technique together. Therefore, DFB PPLN OPO does not require complex optical alignment, when compared with a traditional parametric oscillator.We demonstrate in this dissertation the DFB OPO operation at 3.788 μm wavelength by using a two-photon photorefractive DFB grating. At the same time, we also show the possibility of generating 6-μm laser radiation from a PPLN OPO with a surface-etched DFB grating.