Intra-cavity power effects in singly resonant cw OPOs

A continuous wave singly resonant optical parametric oscillator (cw SRO) has been developed that can be pumped at a level of up to 15 times its oscillation threshold by a single frequency fiber laser pump source. We report the observation of extremely high intra-cavity circulating powers of over 1 kW at the signal wavelength, and associated effects including heating of the nonlinear crystal, and beam quality degradation. Furthermore we show that these effects may be mitigated by implementing output coupling, while also extracting multi-Watt single frequency power output at both signal and idler wavelengths.