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Applied Physics Letters

cw optical wave-front conjugation by saturated absorption in atomic sodium vapor

P. F. Liao, D. M. Bloom, Nicholas P. Economou

Published Jun 15, 1978• 158 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Reconstructed images have been obtained by direct wave-front conjugation in atomic sodium vapor using a cw tunable dye laser. With a pump power of only 15 mW a conversion efficiency of 0.2% has been observed.
DOI
10.1063/1.89926

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Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference•May 12, 1991•0 citations
We have used a two-wave mixing gain process in sodium vapor to construct a self-pumped phase conjugator. This was done by forming a resonator around a quartz sodium cell equipped with Brewster angle windows. A pump beam is then directed into the sodium cell at a small angle to the longitudinal axis of the resonator. At sufficiently high cw pump intensities, the ac-Stark effect pro- vides sufficient gain to achieve oscillation. Although this gain is unidirectional it occurs on the wings of the sodium resonance so that the backward traveling optical field in the resonator does not experience loss due to sodium absorption. The counterpropagating optical fields in the resonator interact with the pump in an internal four- wave mixing process to produce a fourth optical field (phase conjugate to the pump field). Our experiment was conducted at the sodium D2 resonance. The pump laser was a 699 autoscan single frequency ring dye laser providing pump intensities up to several hundred watts per square centimeter.
An experimental investigation was made of resonant nonlinear four-wave frequency mixing processes involving cw laser radiation in sodium vapor. It was found that, in spite of an increase in absorption, the use of resonant atomic nonlinearities can substantially improve the frequency conversion efficiency in the cw regime. The results of the measurements were compared with the theoretical conclusions. Ultraviolet radiation was generated at the sum frequency ( λ s = 268 nm) with the proportionality factor C = W s / W 1 W 2 W 3 ≈2W −2
We report steady-state self-focusing, self-trapping, and self-defocusing of a cw dye laser beam in sodium vapor for frequencies within several Doppler widths of the DDD-line resonance transitions. We measured the variation of the beam profile as the light propagates through the vapor. We observed a 20-mW beam self-trapped in a 12-cm-long filament having a half-power diameter of 70 \ensuremath{\mu}m.
Recently, there has been increased interest in the use of resonant atomic systems for performing optical-wavefront conjugation. This interest has arisen because resonant systems are inherently fast, with response times in the nanosecond range. However, resonant systems tend to have lower efficiencies and greater optical power requirements than do photorefractive crystals, such as BaTiO3. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using a highly efficient Raman laser1 in a sodium-vapor cell to obtain efficient phase conjugation at greatly reduced optical power densities. In this demonstration we use a self-pumped (linear-cavity) conjugator for simplicity. With this setup, we have achieved phase- conjugate reflectivities of 2% with input powers of only 20 W/cm2. This is only 2% of the optical power density previously reported2 to obtain comparable reflectivity with a self-pumped scheme in sodium vapor.