RESUMO
A fraction of the fundamental beam energy deposited into nonlinear crystals to generate second harmonic waves (SHW) causes a temperature gradient within the crystal. This temperature inhomogeneity can alter the refractive index of the medium leading to a well-known effect called thermal dispersion. Therefore, the generated SHW suffers from thermal lensing and a longitudinal thermal phase mismatching. In this work by coupling the heat equation with second harmonic generation (SHG) formalism applied to type-II configuration along with walk-off effect, we investigate the continuous wave (CW) SHW beam profile and conversion efficiency when a non-linear KTP crystal is under induced thermal load. We have demonstrated for average and high powers, the thermal de-phasing lead to considerable reduction in SHG compared to an ideal case in which induced heat is neglected.
RESUMO
Knowledge about the temperature distribution inside solid-state laser crystals is essential for calculation of thermal phase shift, thermal lensing, thermally induced birefringence, and heat-induced crystal bending. Solutions for the temperature distribution for the case of steady-state heat loading have appeared in the literature only for simple cylindrical crystal shapes and are usually based on numerical techniques. For the first time, to our knowledge, a full analytical solution of the heat equation for an anisotropic cubic cross-section solid-state crystal is presented. The crystal is assumed to be longitudinally pumped by a Gaussian pump profile. The pump power attenuation along the crystal and the real cooling mechanisms, such as convection, are considered in detail. A comparison between our analytical solutions and its numerical counterparts shows excellent agreement when just a few terms are employed in the series solutions.
