Journal of the Optical Society of America B
Complete cancellation of noise by means of color-locking in nearly degenerate, four-wave mixing of noisy light
Tanner F. Schulz, Pye Phyo Aung, Lindsay R. Weisel, Krista M. Cosert, Mark W. Gealy, Darin J. Ulness
Abstract
A nearly degenerate, four-wave mixing (ND4WM) setup with noisy light called I^(2)ND4WM(-) is investigated both experimentally and theoretically through factorized-time-correlation (FTC) diagram analysis. This third order nonlinear signal is of interest because the phenomenon of color-locking appears very directly in the measured signal. Color locking is a fundamental aspect of noisy-light spectroscopies that often plays a critical but subtle role in production of the signal. For I^(2)ND4WM(-), color-locking results in complete cancellation of the spectrally broad noise carried by the noisy light used to create it. When combined with FTC diagram analysis the qualitative features of the I^(2)ND4WM(-) can be understood. In addition to the striking noise cancellation, the qualitative features addressed in this work include the time profile, dynamic range, and polarization dependence of the signal. For comparison the spectrally broad I^(2)ND4WM(+) signal is presented.