The coupling of two electromagnetic waves in Kerr media is considered. An exact solution of the coupled-mode equations is derived in the most general case when both pump depletion and material absorption are considered.
The solution of the nondegenerate two-wave-mixing problem in an absorptive Kerr medium including the contribution from nonlinear absorption is obtained for the first time to our knowledge. This solution enables us to analyze the influence of nonlinear absorption on the two-wave-mixing gain and account for previously unexplained results reported for ruby and Cr3+:YAlO3. The effect of nonlinear absorption of a pump beam on the gain of a probe beam is shown to be minimized when incident intensities of the interacting beams are equal. The intensity dependence of the two-wave-mixing gain for dispersive (ruby and Cr3+:YAlO3) media and the gain measurements for absorptive (fluorescein-doped glass) media are also in agreement with the new theory.
This paper presents an exact solution to the slowly varying envelope equations for the probe and signal fluxes in degenerate four-wave mixing in Kerr media. The analysis is performed for a noncollinear geometry, and all beams have the same linear polarization in the nonlinear medium. It is assumed that the angle separating the directions of the counterpropagating pumps and probe and signal beams is large enough so that cross-coupled waves do not contribute to the envelope equations describing the spatial evolution of the pump, probe, and signal beams. Multiple values of the transmitted probe are obtained for equal pump fluxes above a threshold determined by the nonlinear phase shift in the medium. Significant pump depletion occurs in this regime, but it can also occur without the appearance of multiple solutions. Since exact optical phase conjugation occurs only in the limit where the pumps are undepleted in Kerr media, this result implies that there are fundamental upper limits on the pump intensity that can be used to increase signal reflectivities in optical phase conjugation.