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Physical Review Letters

Parametric oscillation in sodium vapor

D. Grandclément, G. Grynberg, M. Pinard

Published Jul 6, 1987• 54 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The properties of a beam generated by self-oscillation due to four-wave mixing in a cavity are described. The experiment is performed in sodium vapor, in continuous-wave regime. This system exhibits an unusually low threshold condition. The output power is of the order of 1 mW and the oscillation is almost always bistable. Phase locking and huge phase-sensitive noise are observed on this oscillating beam.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.59.44

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The properties of a beam generated by self-oscillation due to four-wave mixing in a cavity are described. The experiment is performed in sodium vapor, in continuous-wave regime. This system exhibits an unusually low threshold condition. The output power is of the order of 1 mW and the oscillation is almost always bistable. Phase locking and huge phase-sensitive noise are observed on this oscillating beam.
The experimental characteristics of a four-wave mixing oscillator which uses sodium vapor enclosed in a linear cavity are described. The pump beam depletion and the enhancement of the fluorescence induced by the four-wave mixing oscillation are studied. The situations of pump beams of the same frequency and of different frequencies are considered. In both cases, the output beam almost always exhibits a bistable behavior. The bistability is observed by varying the length of the cavity, the pump beams being constant, or by varying the pump beam intensity, the length of the cavity, the remaining constant. With degenerate pump beams, the phase and the frequency of the output beam is compared to those of the pump beam. In a study of the noise of such a degenerate four-wave oscillator both in the case of degenerate and nondegenerate pumps, a very important phase sensitive noise was observed. This feature was observed for nondegenerate oscillation.>
There is presently a growing interest in nearly degenerate four-wave mixing, both for application in optical phase conjugation and the generation of squeezed states. In particular, the self-oscillation of a system interacting with one or two pump beams has been investigated in great detail in the case of photorefractive materials, but very few experiments have been done in vapors in the cw regime. The results that we obtained using sodium are presented here. They are strikingly different from the results obtained with photorefractive materials. For example, the oscillating beam and pump beam frequencies coincide with a precision better than 10−2 Hz. Another interesting aspect of this oscillating beam is that it exhibits a phase sensitive noise: just above threshold, the noise on one quadrature of the field can be 10−2 times smaller than the noise on the other quadrature.
A theoretical study of the stationary regime of a four-wave mixing oscillator inside a cavity is presented. The theory is developed in a situation where the phase-conjugate reflection R/sub c/ is much smaller than 1. To find the intensity emitted by this oscillator, two types of saturation mechanism, pump-beam depletion and atomic saturation, are considered. The principal characteristics of the degenerate oscillation are the following: very-low-threshold, bistable behavior, and phase locking of the oscillating beam on the pump beams. In the nondegenerate case, it is shown that the position of the phase-conjugate medium inside the cavity is an essential parameter to determine the threshold condition.>