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Applied Physics Letters

Generation of time-reversed optical wave fronts by backward-wave photon echoes

N. S. Shiren

Published Aug 15, 1978• 34 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is shown that backward-wave photon echoes may be generated and the echo wave fronts are time reversed with respect to the first pulse of either a two- or three-pulse input sequence. Some comparisons are made with the four-wave degenerate parametric technique for generating time-reversed wave fronts.
DOI
10.1063/1.90345

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Physical Review Letters•Jul 4, 1983•6 citations
The three-pulse stimulated photon echo has been considered as one of the most fundamental transient four wave mixing processes1, where each of the three excitation pulses induces a single elementary interaction process between a laser field and an inhomogeneously broadened two-level system., resulting in a burst of the fourth wave, i.e., echo. Now if four or more optical pulses are applied to a medium, a number of photon echoes should be expected, in general. At low excitation intensities where the perturbation theory is applicable, however, the dominant nonlinear process is still the three-pulse stimulated echo and consequently each echo signal is generated only by three of the preceding pulses. It is rather a remarkable result that the echo intensity is unaffected by the presence of all the rest of the pulses other than its three generators. With this in mind, it is theoretically and experimentally shown that by applying a single optical pulse (#1) propagating along k1 followed by N pairs of counter-propagating pulses (#2j (k2j) and #3j− (k3j = −k2j); j=1,…N) in various directions, it is possible to obtain N photon echoes along the direction -k1 opposite to the first pulse #1. We will call this degenerate photon echoes, degenerate in. the sense that the echoes are spatially overlapping and temporally simultaneous. When N=l, this scheme is reduced to the ordinary backward photon echo2,3. The doubly degenerate case (N=2) is illustrated in Fig. 1. The j-th echo will be generated by the set of pulses (#1, #2j, #3j) and appear at t = t3j + t2j − t1 where t1, i2j and t3j are the arrival times of the pulses #1, #2j and #3j, respectively.
We have studied the temporal profile of photon-echo signals generated by combined gated cw and pulsed dye-laser excitation of the inhomogeneously broadened, 555.6-nm absorption line of (174)Yb vapor. We find that the echo profile is, after time reversal, essentially identical with that of the first excitation pulse. We give a new analysis of this effect. Since time-reversed pulse reproduction should also occur in inhomogeneously broadened solid samples, and since we observe time-reversed reproduced pulses up to 4% as intense as the input pulse, this effect may have important applications in optical signal-processing systems.