Coherent Nonlinear Optics

V E Sherstobitov

Vladilen S Letokhov, Michael S. Feld

Zihao Pang, Ady Arie

Nonlinear optical interactions are typically driven by coherent sources. Recently, however, incoherent sources have also been shown to offer new opportunities in nonlinear optics. Here we study the effects of the source incoherence in second harmonic generation. We derive and experimentally validate an analytic expression for the far-field coherence function at the second harmonic frequency, which is a generalization of the well-known van Cittert-Zernike theorem. Unlike the linear optics case, here the results depend not only on the source spatial distribution, but also on the nonlinear structure of the crystal. We further show, by performing Young's double-slit measurement, that the coherence at the second harmonic increases as the light propagates inside the nonlinear crystal. Our results establish nonlinearity as a degree of freedom for optical coherence, opening a new research area at the interface of statistical optics and nonlinear optics.

P. Ewart

M F Bukhenskiĭ, V D Novikov, A S Semenov

Academician A.M. Prokhorov was the Rector of the School.The International Schools on Coherent Optics are organized on the initiative of the Scientific Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences on Coherent and Nonlinear Optics beginning from 1980.They are held in socialist countries and deal with current problems in coherent optics.The Seventh School was devoted to nonlinear optical data transmission and fast processing methods and to nonlinear optics of the 416

Kurt Edmund Oughstun