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arXiv:1804.04887 · Physical Review A

Mirrorless optical parametric oscillator inside an all-optical waveguide

Sushree S. Sahoo, Snigdha Sarita Pati, Ashok Kumar Mohapatra

Published Dec 26, 2018• 3 citations
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Abstract

Mirrorless optical parametric oscillator (MOPO) is a consequence of intrinsic feedback provided by the nonlinearity in a medium due to the interaction of a pair of strong counterpropagating fields. As the name suggests, the device does not require a cavity for lasing other than the nonlinear medium. Here we report the demonstration of MOPO under the effect of an all-optical waveguide. The efficient four-wave mixing process due to counterpropagating pump and control fields interacting with a multilevel atomic system facilitates the generation of mirrorless Stokes and anti-Stokes fields counterpropagating to each other. The maximum generated laser power could rise up to mW with pump conversion efficiency more than 30%. Furthermore, the cross-phase modulation due to the strong fields creates all-optical waveguides for the generated fields and hence induces correlated spatial modes in the Stokes and the anti-Stokes fields.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.98.063838

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Mirrorless optical parametric oscillator (MOPO) is a consequence of intrinsic feedback provided by the nonlinearity in a medium due to the interaction of a pair of strong counterpropagating fields. As the name suggests, the device does not require a cavity for lasing other than the nonlinear medium. Here we report the demonstration of MOPO under the effect of an all-optical waveguide. The efficient four-wave mixing process due to counterpropagating pump and control fields interacting with a multilevel atomic system facilitates the generation of mirrorless Stokes and anti-Stokes fields counterpropagating to each other. The maximum generated laser power could rise up to mW with pump conversion efficiency more than 30%. Furthermore, the cross-phase modulation due to the strong fields creates all-optical waveguides for the generated fields and hence induces correlated spatial modes in the Stokes and the anti-Stokes fields.
We report the demonstration of a mirrorless optical parametric oscillator with a tunable threshold in laser-cooled atoms with four-wave mixing (FWM) using electromagnetically induced transparency. Driven by two classical laser beams, the generated Stokes and anti-Stokes fields counterpropagate and build up efficient intrinsic feedback through the nonlinear FWM process. This feedback does not involve any cavity or spatially distributed microstructures. We observe the transition of photon correlation properties from the biphoton quantum regime (below the threshold) to the oscillation regime (above the threshold). The pump threshold can be tuned by varying the operating parameters. We achieve the oscillation with a threshold as low as 15 μW.
We experimentally demonstrate a dissipative phase transition in a mirrorless optical parametric oscillator (MOPO) using a double-$\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Lambda}}$ system in thermal atomic vapor. Bistable behavior is observed in the output power of the beams generated via the MOPO with the variation of the input power of the driving fields. We show that the long-lived hyperfine ground-state coherence induced by the Gaussian pump and the generated fields leads to the observation of optical bistability in the MOPO threshold. We further study the critical slowing-down of nonequilibrium dynamics in the vicinity of the forward threshold where the switching time of the generated fields diverges with the critical exponent, $\ensuremath{\alpha}=\ensuremath{-}0.86\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.02$. Our observations pave the way to understanding and characterizing the phase transitions in driven-dissipative systems using a simple nonlinear optical system like the MOPO.
A mirrorless optical parametric oscillator (MOPO) is a very special class of optical parametric oscillators, where the feedback for oscillation is realized by counter-propagating second-order nonlinear interaction without a need for external mirrors. This arrangement makes the MOPO a very simple, self-aligned and robust oscillator. The MOPO was first proposed theoretically in 1966 however its realization was only possible using the quasi-phase matching (QPM) approach due to requirement for compensation of large momentum mismatch in such interactions. Realization of first-order counter-propagating parametric oscillation requires structures with periodicity in the sub-pm range, which poses substantial fabrication challenges. In addition to its self-aligned nature, MOPO offers unique spectral properties, whereby the spectral contents of the pump are transferred to the forward wave, while the backward wave remains narrowband. So far, only nondegenerate MOPO oscillation has been demonstrated. However, it has been theoretically proposed that a degenerate MOPO could be used to realize a high-brightness biphoton source for quantum optics applications.
Distributed positive feedback established by a counterpropagating three-wave mixing process in a submicrometer structured second-order nonlinear medium leads to mirrorless parametric oscillation with unusual spectral properties. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally and theoretically that the phase modulation of the pump is coherently transferred to the co-propagating parametric wave, while the counterpropagating wave retains a narrow bandwidth and high coherence. The main mechanisms responsible for these properties are the maximized convective separation between the counterpropagating waves and the associated phase-locking between the pump and the co-propagating parametric wave. This suggests that mirrorless optical parametric oscillators can be pumped with incoherent light and still generate highly coherent backward-propagating radiation.
We present an experimental demonstration of simultaneous above-threshold oscillations of the Stokes and anti-Stokes fields together with the single pumping beam with rubidium atoms inside an optical standing-wave cavity. The triple resonant conditions can be achieved easily by making use of the large dispersions due to two-photon transitions in the three-level atomic system. This work provides a way to achieve high efficient nonlinear frequency conversion and the generated bright Stokes and anti-Stokes cavity output beams are potential resource for applications in quantum information science.