Analysis of acceptable spectral windows of quadratic cascaded nonlinear processes in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide

We report a systematic and comparative study of the acceptance bandwidths of two cascaded quadratic nonlinear processes in periodically poled lithium niobate waveguides, namely cascaded second-harmonic generation and difference-frequency generation (cSHG/DFG) and cascaded sum-frequency generation and difference-frequency generation (cSFG/DFG). We first theoretically and experimentally study the acceptance bandwidths of both the individual second-harmonic generation (SHG) and sum-frequency generation (SFG) processes in the continuous wave (CW) and pulsed-pump regimes. Our results show that the SHG bandwidth is approximately half that of the SFG process in the CW regime, whereas the SHG acceptance bandwidth can approach the CW SFG bandwidth limit when pulsed-pump is used. As a consequence we conclude that the tuning bandwidths of both cascaded processes should be similar in the pulsed pump regime once the pump pulse bandwidths approach that of SFG (i.e. the cSHG/DFG bandwidth is not limited by the CW SHG bandwidth). We confirm that this is the case experimentally