Abstract:
A systematic investigation was made of photorefractive and nonlinear optical properties of LiNbO3:Mg, LiNbO3:Fe, LiNbO3:Mg:Fe and LiNbO3:Mg:Nd crystals grown from congruent melts with a wide range of dopant concentrations. The nonlinear optical properties depended nonmonotonically on the impurity concentration and strong suppression of photorefraction was observed when the magnesium concentration was more than 1%. Crystals containing 2.6% Mg were used for second harmonic generation of radiation emitted by a YAG:Nd3+ laser at room temperature with a conversion efficiency of 25%.