Patent ID: 7630417

Claim:
A method, comprising: splitting a laser beam from a laser into a first laser beam into a first optical arm of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and a second laser beam into a second optical arm of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer; inserting a nonlinear whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) resonator formed of a fluorite crystal material exhibiting optical nonlinearities for nonlinear wave mixing in the first optical arm of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer to receive the first laser beam from an input end of the first optical arm and to output a filtered first laser beam to an output end of the first optical arm, wherein the whispering-gallery-mode resonator comprises at least a portion of a spheroid with an eccentricity larger than 0.1; controlling the laser beam entering the Mach-Zehnder interferometer by setting a power level of the first laser beam above a threshold and effectuating nonlinear wave mixing inside the WGM resonator, including suppressing light in the TM mode caused by Raman scattering and generating the nonlinear wavemixing in TE sets of whispering-gallery modes circulating along an equator of the spheroid around a short ellipsoid axis based on an electronic nonlinearity for the TE mode by controlling polarization of the laser beam to be parallel to a symmetric axis of the WGM resonator wherein the suppressing step occurs while the generating step occurs; combining the filtered first laser beam and the second laser beam to produce a combined optical beam as an output of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer; converting the combined optical beam into an electronic detector signal; and observing an optical hyperparametric oscillation caused by the nonlinear wave mixing in the WGM resonator.