Ultrafast adiabatic second harmonic generation

We introduce a generalization of the adiabatic frequency conversion method for an efficient conversion of ultrashort pulses in the full nonlinear regime. Our analysis takes into account dispersion as well as two-photon processes and Kerr effect, allowing complete analysis of any three waves with arbitrary phase mismatched design and any nonlinear optical process. We use this analysis to design an efficient and robust second harmonic generation, the most widely used nonlinear process for both fundamental and applied research. We experimentally show that such design not only allows for very efficient conversion of various of ultrashort pulses, but is also very robust to variations in the parameters of both the nonlinear crystal and the incoming light. These include variation of more than 100 °C in the crystal temperature, a wide bandwidth of up to 75 nm and a chirp variation of 300 fs to 3.5 ps of the incoming pulse. Also, we show the dependency of the adiabatic second harmonic generation design on the pump intensity and the crystal length. Our study shows that two photon absorption plays a critical role in such high influence nonlinear dynamics, and that it must be considered in order to achieve agreement with experimental results.