Widely tunable femtosecond fiber optical parametric oscillator

The phase-matching condition in a fiber is discussed. A balance among the different orders of fiber dispersion can be found to achieve a widely tuning modulation instability gain for pumping around the normal dispersion regime. Three coupled nonlinear wave equations are used to simulate the femtosecond fiber optical parametric oscillator. The numerical results show that, through appropriate choice of dispersion, femtosecond pulses with a 180-nm tunable range can be generated when pump wavelength near a fiber’s zero-dispersion wavelength is tuned only 7 nm. Further tuning is limited by the walk-off between the pump and the signal pulses.