Cascaded four-wave mixing for broadband tunable laser sideband generation

We demonstrate the versatile broadband wavelength tunability of frequency upconverted multicolor cascaded four-wave-mixing (CFWM) signals spanning the continuous wavelength range from UV to near IR in a thin type-I BBO crystal using 35 fs, 800 nm fundamental and chirped IR supercontinuum white light pulses. Two sets of spatially dispersed CFWM laser sidebands are concomitantly generated from two incident pulses as well as their second-harmonic-generation and sum-frequency-generation pulses in a crossing geometry. The tunable cascaded signals with ultrabroad bandwidth can be readily achieved via spatially rotating the BBO crystal to different phase-matching conditions and temporally varying the time delay between the two incident near-IR pulses.