Nonlinear Dynamics in Pulsed Degenerate OPOs: from Pulse Compression to Coherent Computing

In a degenerate optical parametric oscillator (OPO), pump photons are split into pairs of signal photons with a nonlinear crystal. When pumped with a synchronous train of pulses, this gives rise to rich nonlinear dynamics in which dispersion, nonlinearity, walkoff play an equally important role. Although this must generally be modeled numerically, this talk covers our recent work deriving reduced models for these dynamics. Applications will also be presented, including pulse compression in half-harmonic generation of frequency combs, and the use of multi-OPO networks as a coherent optimization machine for solving Ising problems.