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Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Four-wave parametric oscillation: theory and observations

Ken-ichi Harada, Nobuhito Hayashi, Kenji Mori, Masaharu Mitsunaga

Published Dec 19, 2007• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present theoretically and experimentally a novel type of parametric fluorescence and oscillation in which four optical waves in off-axis, diagonal directions simultaneously build up under resonant counterpropagating pump-laser excitation in atomic sodium vapor. Two of the four are anti-Stokes shifted and the other two are Stokes shifted, and they are strongly coupled owing to electromagnetically induced diffraction. Theoretically, the Liouville-Maxwell equations are solved to derive four-wave propagation equations. Experimentally, we have observed four-wave parametric oscillation when a weak off-axis seed beam is introduced into otherwise axially symmetric parametric fluorescence patterns. Temporal waveforms are also analyzed, and strong correlations between any pairs of the four emissions are identified.

DOI
10.1364/josab.25.000040

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We present theoretically and experimentally a novel type of parametric fluorescence and oscillation in which four optical waves in off-axis, diagonal directions simultaneously build up under resonant counterpropagating pump-laser excitation in atomic sodium vapor. Two of the four are anti-Stokes shifted and the other two are Stokes shifted, and they are strongly coupled owing to electromagnetically induced diffraction. Theoretically, the Liouville-Maxwell equations are solved to derive four-wave propagation equations. Experimentally, we have observed four-wave parametric oscillation when a weak off-axis seed beam is introduced into otherwise axially symmetric parametric fluorescence patterns. Temporal waveforms are also analyzed, and strong correlations between any pairs of the four emissions are identified.
We study experimentally nonlinear optical processes in which Stokes and anti-Stokes fields build up under strong, resonant, counterpropagating pump laser excitation in atomic sodium vapor. We find that, at some pump frequency, two off-axis anti-Stokes emissions propagating along reflection-symmetric directions are strongly temporally correlated, with a correlation time of $0.5\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\ensuremath{\mu}\mathrm{s}$ and a correlation range of 1mrad1\phantom{\rule{0.3em}{0ex}}\mathrm{mrad}1mrad. It is shown by the numerical analysis based on six-wave mixing process involving pump, Stokes, and anti-Stokes waves in the forward and the backward directions that such correlated anti-Stokes emissions are possible when the medium is opaque for the Stokes field and transparent for the anti-Stokes field. Possibilities of quantum correlation for entangled photon generation using this system are discussed.
Two types of parametric four-wave mixing are observed when a single intense laser beam propagates through Na vapor near the D(1) and D(2) resonance lines. The first is related to three-photon scattering, while the second results from the coherent parametric interaction of the laser with excited-state Raman scattering. Identification of the two processes was greatly facilitated by the use of an optical multichannel detector system to observe the total emission spectrum for each individual laser pulse. The experimental conditions that determine whether stimulated emission or one or both of the four-wave mixing processes dominates the emission spectrum are described.
We report the demonstration of a mirrorless optical parametric oscillator with a tunable threshold in laser-cooled atoms with four-wave mixing (FWM) using electromagnetically induced transparency. Driven by two classical laser beams, the generated Stokes and anti-Stokes fields counterpropagate and build up efficient intrinsic feedback through the nonlinear FWM process. This feedback does not involve any cavity or spatially distributed microstructures. We observe the transition of photon correlation properties from the biphoton quantum regime (below the threshold) to the oscillation regime (above the threshold). The pump threshold can be tuned by varying the operating parameters. We achieve the oscillation with a threshold as low as 15 μW.
An effort was made to optimize the coherent anti-Stokes scattering four-photon parametric oscillation process in thallium vapor in the 277 nm range. The dependence of the stimulated emission power on the thallium vapor pressure, confocal parameter, detuning from two-photon resonance, and pump power was investigated. The considerable saturation of the parametric oscillation power observed both with respect to the pump power and the vapor pressure was attributed to the breakdown of the wave interaction as a result of the strong high-frequency Kerr effect under two-photon resonance conditions.