A heated crystal holder with its own controller, used where phase matching or poling period is tuned by temperature, as with noncritically phase-matched LBO or PPLN. Temperature stability of a tenth of a degree or better keeps conversion steady. PPLN is often run hot to suppress photorefractive damage, and ovens must be ramped slowly to avoid cracking crystals.
Oven's still ramping, give it twenty minutes to settle at 148 before you open the shutter on the LBO.
Never put full power through a crystal whose oven has not reached setpoint: you can be far from phase matching and still absorb enough to damage it.
Also heard as
- crystal oven
- crystal heater
Related terms
Phase matching
Keeping interacting waves in a nonlinear crystal in step so the generated light builds up instead of canceling.
Quasi-phase matching
Phase matching by periodically flipping a crystal's nonlinear orientation instead of relying on birefringence.
Doubler
Lab slang for the frequency-doubling crystal or module that turns an infrared laser into its second harmonic.
SHG
Second Harmonic Generation: converting light to exactly double its frequency, half its wavelength, in a nonlinear crystal.