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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Coherent perfect absorption in nonlinear optics

Yuanlin Zheng, Wenjie Wan, Xianfeng Chen

Published Feb 22, 2013• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Recently, a concept of time reversed lasing or coherent perfect absorber (CPA) has been proposed by A. D. Stone and co-workers, and was shortly experimentally demonstrated by them. The CPA system is illuminated coherently and monochromatically by the time reverse of the output of a lasing mode and the incident radiation is perfectly absorbed. Shortly afterwards, Stefano Longhi extended the idea to realize a CPA for colored incident light, and have theoretically shown that the time reversal of optical parametric oscillation (OPO) in a nonlinear medium could also realize a colored CPA for incident signal and idler fields which can be seemed as a kind of nonlinear CPA. Here we present the realization of such time-reversed processes in nonlinear optics regime, including time-reversed second harmonic generation (SHG) for coherent absorption at harmonic frequency of the pump and time-reversed optical parametric amplification (OPA) for coherent attenuation of colored travelling optical fields. Time reversed SHG is carried out at both phase matching and mismatching conditions, which shows parametric near perfect absorption at the harmonic frequency of the pump. The time reversal of OPA is demonstrated experimentally in a nonlinear medium to form a coherent absorber for perpendicularly polarized signal and idler travelling waves, realizing in the condition of OPA by a type II phase matching scheme. The absorption of signal/idler pair occurs at some specific phase difference. This is the first experimental demonstration of coherent absorption processes in nonlinear optics regime.

DOI
10.1117/12.2007174

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Recently, a concept of time reversed lasing or coherent perfect absorber (CPA) has been proposed by A. D. Stone and co-workers, and was shortly experimentally demonstrated by them. The CPA system is illuminated coherently and monochromatically by the time reverse of the output of a lasing mode and the incident radiation is perfectly absorbed. Shortly afterwards, Stefano Longhi extended the idea to realize a CPA for colored incident light, and have theoretically shown that the time reversal of optical parametric oscillation (OPO) in a nonlinear medium could also realize a colored CPA for incident signal and idler fields which can be seemed as a kind of nonlinear CPA. Here we present the realization of such time-reversed processes in nonlinear optics regime, including time-reversed second harmonic generation (SHG) for coherent absorption at harmonic frequency of the pump and time-reversed optical parametric amplification (OPA) for coherent attenuation of colored travelling optical fields. Time reversed SHG is carried out at both phase matching and mismatching conditions, which shows parametric near perfect absorption at the harmonic frequency of the pump. The time reversal of OPA is demonstrated experimentally in a nonlinear medium to form a coherent absorber for perpendicularly polarized signal and idler travelling waves, realizing in the condition of OPA by a type II phase matching scheme. The absorption of signal/idler pair occurs at some specific phase difference. This is the first experimental demonstration of coherent absorption processes in nonlinear optics regime.
Perfect absorption of light critically affects light-matter interaction for various applications. Coherent perfect absorbers (CPAs) gain the unique capability of controlling light with light in a linear fashion. Multicolor CPAs [S. Longhi, Time-reversed optical parametric oscillation, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 033901 (2011)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.107.033901] are highly desirable for broadband and nonlinear light-to-light coherent control but the experimental demonstration has still remained elusive. Here, for the first time, we experimentally observe a dual-color version of a CPA (DC-CPA) through a second harmonic generation in a single whispering-gallery-mode microcavity. The DC-CPA enables simultaneous perfect absorption of both the incoming fundamental wave and its second harmonic. Similar to its linear counterpart, coherent control in the DC-CPA can also be realized by tuning the relative phase and intensity between the two-colored waves through nonlinear interference instead of the linear one. This scheme breaks the linear boundary of the traditional CPA into a multifrequency domain and paves the way toward all-optical signal processing and quantum information.
In recent works, the idea of time-reversed laser oscillation has been proposed and demonstrated to realize a two-channel coherent perfect absorber [Y. D. Chong et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 053901 (2010); W. Wan et al., Science 331, 889 (2011)]. Here the time reversal of optical parametric oscillation in a nonlinear χ(2) medium is considered and shown to realize a coherent perfect absorber for colored incident signal and idler fields. A detailed analysis is presented for the time-reversed process of mirrorless optical parametric oscillation in the full nonlinear regime.
Recent works [Chong et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 053901 (2010); Wan et al., Science 331, 889 (2011)] have shown that the time-reversed process of lasing at threshold realizes a coherent perfect absorber (CPA). In a CPA, a lossy medium in an optical cavity with a specific degree of dissipation, equal in modulus to the gain of the lasing medium, can perfectly absorb coherent optical waves at discrete frequencies that are the time-reversed counterpart of the lasing modes. Here the concepts of time reversal of lasing and CPA are extended for optical radiation emitted by a laser operated in an arbitrary regime, i.e., for transient, chaotic, or periodic coherent optical fields. We prove that any electromagnetic signal E(t)E(t)E(t) generated by a laser system SSS operated in an arbitrary regime can be perfectly absorbed by a CPA device ${S}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ which is simply realized by placing inside SSS a broadband linear absorber (attenuator) of appropriate transmittance. As examples, we discuss CPA devices that perfectly absorb a chaotic laser signal and a frequency-modulated optical wave.
In recent works, it has been shown, rather generally, that the time-reversed process of lasing at threshold realizes a coherent perfect absorber (CPA). In a CPA, a lossy medium in an optical cavity with a specific degree of dissipation, equal in modulus to the gain of the lasing medium, can perfectly absorb coherent optical waves that are the time-reversed counterpart of the lasing field. Here, the time-reversed process of lasing is considered in detail for a homogeneously broadened two-level medium in an optical cavity and the conditions for CPA are derived. It is shown that, owing to the dispersive properties of the two-level medium, exact time-reversal symmetry is broken and the frequency of the field at which CPA occurs is generally different than the one of the lasing mode. Moreover, at a large cooperation parameter, the observation of CPA in the presence of bistability requires one to operate in the upper branch of the hysteresis cycle.
Perfect absorption of light critically affects light-matter interaction for various applications. Coherent perfect absorbers (CPA) gain the unique capability of controlling light with light in a linear fashion. Multi-color CPAs [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 033901] are highly desirable for broadband and nonlinear light-to-light coherent control, however, the experimental demonstration has still remained elusive. Here we experimentally observe a dual-color version of CPA (DC-CPA) through a second harmonic generation in a single whispering-gallery-mode microcavity. The DC-CPA enables simultaneous perfect absorption of both the incoming fundamental wave and its second harmonic. Similar to its linear counterpart, coherent control in the DC-CPA can be also realized by tuning the relative phase and intensity between the two-colored waves through nonlinear interference instead of the linear one. This scheme breaks the linear boundary of the traditional CPA into a multi-frequency domain and paves the way toward all-optically signal processing and quantum information.
Time-reversal symmetry is important to optics. Optical processes can run in a forward or backward direction through time when such symmetry is preserved. In linear optics, a time-reversed process of laser emission can enable total absorption of coherent light fields inside an optical cavity of loss by time-reversing the original gain medium. Nonlinearity, however, can often destroy such symmetry in nonlinear optics, making it difficult to study time-reversal symmetry with nonlinear optical wave mixings. Here we demonstrate time-reversed wave mixings for optical second harmonic generation (SHG) and optical parametric amplification (OPA) by exploring this well-known but underappreciated symmetry in nonlinear optics. This allows us to observe the annihilation of coherent beams. Our study offers new avenues for flexible control in nonlinear optics and has potential applications in efficient wavelength conversion, all-optical computing.