Tunable, high-power, high-order optical vortex beam generation in the mid-infrared.

We report the generation of tunable high-order optical vortices in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) using a picosecond optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The OPO is based on MgO:PPLN as the nonlinear gain medium and synchronously pumped by a mode-locked Yb-fiber laser at 1064 nm. Using a singly-resonant oscillator configuration for the OPO, we have achieved direct transfer of pump optical vortices to the non-resonant idler beam, with the resonant signal in the Gaussian cavity mode. We demonstrate the successful transfer of pump optical vortices of order, lp = 1 to 5, to the idler beam of the same order across the mid-IR, with an output power of 630 mW to 130 mW across 2538 nm to 4035 nm for the highest idler vortex order, li = 5. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of an OPO pumped by a vortex beam of order as high as lp = 5 and generating idler vortices of high order in the mid-IR.