Orientation-patterned gallium arsenide (OP-GaAs) and gallium phosphide (OP-GaP) are strategic nonlinear optical crystals, extending the many merits of quasi-phase-matching (QPM) deep into the mid-infrared spectral range (2-12 microns). Chief among the benefits of QPM are 1) long interaction lengths, enabled by non-critical phase-matching (NCPM, which eliminates birefringence walk-off) to reduce the threshold for low-peak-power applications, and 2) extremely broad-band tunability, by replacing angle tuning with simple translation across discrete- or continuously-varying grating periods. Since orientation-patterning is a vastly different mechanism from electric-field poling, a different set of design criteria exists for these materials, which are described in this talk.
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