High-power, widely tunable, picosecond coherent source from optical parametric amplification in barium borate

Abstract
We report the performance of a type‐I barium borate optical parametric amplifier pumped by 15 ps, 355 nm laser pulses. We show that it is possible to obtain narrowband (≂3 Å), high‐energy (≥200 μJ), widely tunable (0.4–2 μm) picosecond pulses with a maximum pump‐to‐signal energy conversion better than 30%.