Theory and Application of Optical Subharmonic Oscillator

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The theory of an optical subharmonic oscillator and its application are presented. The optical subharmonic oscillator is composed of a mixer, a harmonic generator and amplifiers. Steady-state operation and buildup of subharmonic oscillations are analyzed under a plane-wave approximation. Fourier synthesis of the subharmonics and their harmonics can produce a train of sub-femtosecond or femtosecond pulses of arbitrary shapes. In addition, a novel scheme of optical frequency measurement can be constructed using the optical subharmonic oscillators. A practical system of absolute frequency measurement is proposed.