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Standoff detection measuring the fluorescence spectra of seven different biological agents excited by 294 nm as well as 355 nm wavelength laser pulses has been undertaken. The biological warfare agent simulants were released in a semi-closed aerosol chamber at 210 m standoff distance and excited by light at either of the two wavelengths using the same instrument. Significant differences in several of the agents’ fluorescence response were seen at the two wavelengths. The anthrax simulants’ fluorescence responses were almost an order of magnitude stronger at the shorter wavelength excitation. However, most importantly, the fluorescence spectra were significantly more dissimilar at 294 nm than at 355 nm excitation with ~7 nm spectral resolution. This indicates that classification of the substances should be possible with a lower error rate for standoff detection using 294 nm rather than 355 nm excitation wavelength, or even better, utilizing both.

Absorption at the idler wavelength in an optical parametric oscillator (OPO) is often considered detrimental. We show through simulations that pulsed OPOs with significant idler absorption can perform better than OPOs with low idler absorption both in terms of conversion efficiency and beam quality. The main reason for this is reduced back conversion. We also show how the beam quality depends on the beam width and pump pulse length, and present scaling relations to use the example simulations for other pulsed nanosecond OPOs.

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We demonstrate with simulations and experiments that an optical parametric oscillator using two different crystals with orthogonal walk-off planes can generate a symmetric, high-quality beam even if the resonator has a high Fresnel number. In the experiments we used KTA and BBO crystals to convert 5 ns pulses at 1.06 microm to 1.7 microm pulses with more than 10 mJ energy and beam quality M(2) approximately 2.