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Physical Review Letters

Polarization bistability of counterpropagating laser beams

Daniel J. Gauthier, Michelle S. Malcuit, Alexander L. Gaeta, Robert W. Boyd

Published Apr 9, 1990• 81 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We have observed bistability in the states of polarization of laser beams counterpropagating through sodium vapor. No external feedback is provided; the beams interact solely through four-wave mixing processes.
DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.64.1721

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Physical Review A•Oct 1, 1997•19 citations
The interaction of two counterpropagating beams in a nonlinear medium leads to many interesting phenomena. One such phenomenon is the occurrence of optical bistability arising from the mutual interaction of the two beams.1 This type of cross-trapping optical bistability is similar to one of those proposed by Kaplan.2 The physics of cross-trapping optical bistability is similar to the self-focusing bistability3 where self-trapping occurs in a single-beam/single-reflector setup. Cross-trapping bistability differs in that it has no external feedback and therefore is the first mirrorless bistability not based on an increasing absorption effect.
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.
We observe amplification of a linearly polarized laser beam propagating through a Doppler-broadened atomic potassium vapor driven by an intense, linear and orthogonally polarized counterpropagating laser beam. The observed gain spectra are well explained by a model that incoporates only the effects of the coherent driving of the atomic dipole moment and not atomic recoil. Our results suggest that the recently reported observations of amplification and lasing using a laser-driven sodium vapor may not arise from the effects of collective atomic recoil.