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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Drift Instability for a Laser Beam Transmitted through a Rubidium Cell with Feedback Mirror

A. Petrossian, Laurent Dambly, G. Grynberg

Published Jan 20, 1995• 23 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present the characteristics of the spatio-temporal instability that occurs when rubidium atoms interact with an incident laser beam and with the beam reflected from a tilted feedback mirror. We show that there is a drift of the roll pattern that appears above threshold. Measurements of the drift frequency are in excellent agreement with recent predictions. An experiment done with two incident waves shows a more complex spatio-temporal behaviour.

DOI
10.1209/0295-5075/29/3/004

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Physical Review A•Feb 1, 1996•26 citations
We present the characteristics of the spatio-temporal instability that occurs when rubidium atoms interact with an incident laser beam and with the beam reflected from a tilted feedback mirror. We show that there is a drift of the roll pattern that appears above threshold. Measurements of the drift frequency are in excellent agreement with recent predictions. An experiment done with two incident waves shows a more complex spatio-temporal behaviour.
Pattern formation in nonlinear systems is a very active subject in many areas of physics. For example, in hydrodynamics the arrangement of the convective cells of the Rayleigh-Bernard instability [1] constitutes a model problem for pattern formation. In optics, important advances have been recently obtained in the case of lasers [2]. In contrast, transverse pattern formation in mirrorless optical passive systems [3] is no so wellknown because of the intrinsic complexity of a system without cavity and of the fact that the first experiments were done with pulsed lasers [4], We present here results obtained with c.w. lasers and rubidium atoms. In particular, we show some interesting relationship with the hydrodynamics observations.
Pattern formation in nonlinear systems is a very active subject in many areas of physics. For example, in hydrodynamics the arrangement of the convective cells of the Rayleigh-Bernard instability [1] constitutes a model problem for pattern formation. In optics, important advances have been recently obtained in the case of lasers [2]. In contrast, transverse pattern formation in mirrorless optical passive systems [3] is no so wellknown because of the intrinsic complexity of a system without cavity and of the fact that the first experiments were done with pulsed lasers [4]. We present here results obtained with c.w. lasers and rubidium atoms. In particular, the relationship with hydrodynamics observations, suggests the possible existence of some general rule for pattern formation.
The instability threshold characteristics are investigated for two different optical devices, the ring cavity and the feedback mirror, with passive weakly absorbing two-level atoms cell. The linear stability analysis of the ring cavity predicts emission of several conical shells, depending on the optical arrangement and the buffer gas pressure. In the case of pure vapor, each conical shell has its own frequency. All the cones display the same frequency in the case of large buffer gas pressure. The feedback mirror device displays very different instability characteristics, with only one frequency emitted along a unique cone, in agreement with the experiment. The self-oscillation is shown to be controlled by the reflectivity properties of the cell, which behaves at threshold as a mixture of ordinary mirror and phase conjugate mirror