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arXiv:2506.06871 · Physical Review A

Influence of Kerr anisotropy in parametric amplification

Nathan G. Drouillard, Fadi Farook, Meerna Albert, Rachel Durling, Jordan Saad, Jeffrey G. Rau, T. J. Hammond

Published Mar 17, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Four-wave parametric amplification can be extended to the TW/cm$^2$ regime using femtosecond pump pulses to amplify nearly octave spanning pulses with gain $> 20$~mm$^{-1}$, which we call Kerr instability amplification. Cross-polarized wave generation exploits Kerr anisotropy to induce a transient intensity-dependent polarization evolution. In this work, we combine Kerr instability amplification with cross-polarized wave generation to simultaneously amplify and rotate the output polarization of a signal beam, and we explore laser and crystal parameters to control the resulting polarization. In 1~mm MgO(100), we amplify linearly polarized light by $2000\times$ orthogonal to the pump and seed polarization. The parametric amplification and polarization rotation offers excellent pulse contrast enhancement for future high-power laser systems. Furthermore, the polarization provides an additional observable to study the nonlinear dynamics occuring in this extreme ultrafast light-matter interaction.

DOI
10.1103/hqqh-q2c9

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Four-wave parametric amplification can be extended to the TW/cm2^22 regime using femtosecond pump pulses to amplify nearly octave spanning pulses with gain >20> 20>20mm−1^{-1}−1, which we call Kerr instability amplification. Cross-polarized wave generation exploits Kerr anisotropy to induce a transient intensity-dependent polarization evolution. In this work, we combine Kerr instability amplification with cross-polarized wave generation to simultaneously amplify and rotate the output polarization of a signal beam, and we explore laser and crystal parameters to control the resulting polarization. In 1mm MgO(100), we amplify linearly polarized light by 2000×2000\times2000× orthogonal to the pump and seed polarization. The parametric amplification and polarization rotation offers excellent pulse contrast enhancement for future high-power laser systems. Furthermore, the polarization provides an additional observable to study the nonlinear dynamics occuring in this extreme ultrafast light-matter interaction.
We theoretically and experimentally study changes with pump power in the polarization of an optical signal as it simultaneously experiences Kerr-effect-induced birefringence and four-wave-mixing-based parametric amplification from a copropagating pump in an optical fiber. It is shown that the changes caused by the two nonlinear optical effects are orthogonal to each other in the Stokes space. Results also show that the pump polarization state works as an attractor for signal polarization. The implications of this feature to fiber parametric amplifiers and entangled-photon sources are discussed, and a fiber polarization switch is demonstrated.
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