Towards versatile coherent pulse synthesis using femtosecond laser and optical parametric oscillators

Pulses from a tunable near-infrared femtosecond optical parametric oscillator and its Ti:sapphire pump laser were phase-locked by matching their carrier-envelope phase-slip frequencies to one quarter of their common pulse repetition frequency. Interferometric second-order cross-correlation and spectral interferometry traces demonstrated their mutual coherence for periods of at least 20 ms, compared with individual coherence times of 0.1 ms estimated from their phase-noise power spectra. This result is a prerequisite for versatile coherent pulse synthesis. Implications for the synthesis of arbitrary waveforms from multi-colour pulses are discussed.