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Physical Review A

Interpretation for Rayleigh self-oscillations in a pure sodium vapor driven by counterpropagating light beams

Martine Le Berre, Elisabeth Ressayre, Andree A. Tallet

Published Oct 1, 1992• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

With the intent to explain the onset of a Rayleigh instability in a pure sodium cell driven by counterpropagating light beams, we report a theory that includes pump-depletion effects. A model is developed for fast-moving atoms that predicts the occurrence of a Rayleigh instability for sufficiently large concentration, which may explain the experimental observation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.46.4123

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With the intent to explain the onset of a Rayleigh instability in a pure sodium cell driven by counterpropagating light beams, we report a theory that includes pump-depletion effects. A model is developed for fast-moving atoms that predicts the occurrence of a Rayleigh instability for sufficiently large concentration, which may explain the experimental observation.
We use the gain-feedback approach1 to explain a number of instabilities observed in sodium vapor with the laser frequency vL tuned to the defocusing side of line center at v0. The gain curve, which includes motion of the atoms, predicts two regions of possible gain: Rayleigh gain for frequencies v just above vL and Raman gain for v ≅vL - vR, where vR is the on-resonance Rabi frequency; see Fig. 1.2 Lasing based on these two gain mechanisms has been seen in three different feedback configurations. The new observations are: Rayleigh-gain lasing with no external mirrors using the distributed feedback of counterpropagating pump beams, Rayleigh-gain lasing without a foreign gas, Raman-gain lasing in a ring cavity (see Fig. 2), and both Rayleigh and Raman lasing using a single feedback mirror.
The threshold characteristics of the static and periodic instability of the single feedback mirror device are investigated for a homogeneously broadened two-level medium as a function of the input intensity, the detuning, the buffer-gas pressure, the atomic concentration, and the round-trip time d, and compared with experimental results. For a large range of parameters that agrees with the experiment, the self-oscillation process is shown to be mainly induced by the longitudinal grating, which ensures a large instability domain, and controlled by the buffer-gas pressure, which must be low enough in order that the threshold period of the oscillation is constant on a doughnutlike transverse profile and nearly equal to 2d. This oscillation, called the 2d oscillation, is neither a result of pure phase-conjugate-mirror operation of the atomic medium nor a result of a Rabi sideband gain process. It is shown to take place through a mixture of phase-conjugate-mirror and ordinary mirror operations, which are both allowed by the specific optical arrangement of the device.
We have observed that the polarizations and intensities of counterpropagating laser beams in sodium vapor are temporally unstable. The output from a stabilized dye laser tuned near to the 3S1/2 → 3P1/2 atomic transition was split to form the two counterpropagating beams. These beams were polarized with the same linear polarization and were weakly focused to a spot size of ~750 μm in sodium vapor having a density of ~3 × 1013 cm−3. We monitored the light generated in the polarization orthogonal to that of the pump beams. For a detuning of 1.01 GHz to the high-frequency side of the 3S1/2(F = 2) → 3P1/2(F = 2) transition and a power of 160 mW in one of the beams, we found that the threshold for the instability occurred at a power of 15 mW in the other beam. Slightly above threshold, the instability was found to be periodic in nature. As the intensity in the counterpropagating beam was increased far above the threshold value, wild fluctuations in the polarizations and intensities of the transmitted beams were observed. We have found that these fluctuations are chaotic and that the system evolves on a strange attractor whose dimension increases with increasing laser power. These observations are in qualitative agreement with the theoretical predictions of Gaeta et al.,1 which predict that the polarizations of counterpropagating beams in a Kerr medium are unstable to the growth of temporal fluctuations.