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

Phase conjugation by a technique of spatial radiation filtering in a saturable absorber

V E Sherstobitov, Andrey Yu. Rodionov

Published May 19, 1998• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

To the best of our knowledge, a novel self-phase-conjugation technique for laser radiation is proposed, which is based on the self-filtration of the phase-conjugate component in a nonlinear absorbing medium, bleached by a pump wave with the intricate spatial structure in the region of location of its speckles. Similar to the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) case, the mechanism of the phase-conjugate wave discrimination against the noise background is based on the coincidence of the speckles in the pump and conjugate waves throughout the bulk of the medium. To compensate for a drop in the signal power due to total absorption, the amplification in conventional laser gain cells is used. The feasibility of the phase conjugation with reflectivities from unity to tens of percent is demonstrated by analytical estimates and numerical calculations. The technique can find application in the middle and far IR spectral regions, where the implementation of phase conjugation via SBS is either hindered or impossible at all.

DOI
10.1117/12.308343

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To the best of our knowledge, a novel self-phase-conjugation technique for laser radiation is proposed, which is based on the self-filtration of the phase-conjugate component in a nonlinear absorbing medium, bleached by a pump wave with the intricate spatial structure in the region of location of its speckles. Similar to the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) case, the mechanism of the phase-conjugate wave discrimination against the noise background is based on the coincidence of the speckles in the pump and conjugate waves throughout the bulk of the medium. To compensate for a drop in the signal power due to total absorption, the amplification in conventional laser gain cells is used. The feasibility of the phase conjugation with reflectivities from unity to tens of percent is demonstrated by analytical estimates and numerical calculations. The technique can find application in the middle and far IR spectral regions, where the implementation of phase conjugation via SBS is either hindered or impossible at all.
As it is known, self-conjugation of the IR laser beam via Brillouin radiation stimulated scattering phenomenon is not realised because of some physical limits on radiation intensity which are the principal limitations, to the present time. That is why, one of the promising technique of phase conjugation of infrared radiation is a self-conjugation of a laser beam wavefront via four wave interaction in a nonlinear medium with feed-back loop (FWMF) [1]. Unlike conventional our wave mixing schemes, the FWMF self-conjugation is supposed to be realised without any additional beams pumping a phase conjugation mirror.
Nonlinear optics normally involves the change in the susceptibility of a material due to the presence of optical radiation. In many cases, the light-matter interaction produces a change in the refractive index of the medium, as occurs in photorefractive media, as well as in Kerr-like media, Brillouin-active media and absorbing media with thermallyinduced refractive index changes. Such nonlinear refractive index variation corresponds to a change in the real part of the optical susceptibility %. In resonant materials, the optical radiation induces stimulated emission (or absorption) causing transfer of population between different energy states of the medium. This can lead to saturation of the amplification (or absorption) corresponding to changes in the imaginary part of the susceptibility x= i2odk where the amplitude gain coefficient a(I) is a saturable function of the intensity /, and k is the magnitude of the wavevector of the optical radiation. The interference of two (or more) coherent beams I(x) in the laser amplifier can cause a modulation of the population inversion N(x). This modulation of the inversion is commonly known as spatial hole burning in lasers and leads to formation of a gain-grating a(x) = 1/2GN(X) where G is the stimulated emission cross-section. The gain grating can act as a very efficient diffractive optical element exhibiting high diffraction efficiency that may be even greater than unity [16] and also very high phase conjugate reflectivity using four-wave mixing (FWM) geometries [5-7].
The phase conjugation (PC) of a focused Gaussian laser beam with a partial spatial coherence of the wave front is studied numerically and theoretically upon SBS within the framework of a three-dimensional nonstationary SBS model, which takes into account transient processes and SBS saturation. The dependences of the PC coefficient h on the laser radiation power are obtained for different excesses of the angular divergence over the diffraction limit ξ . It is found that for the given reflectance of laser radiation from the SBS mirror, the PC coefficient monotonically decreases with increasing the divergence. For example, under the near threshold SBS conditions, h decreases from 70% to 30%, when ξ increases from 1 to 10. For the given divergence, the PC coefficient increases with increasing the reflectance and approaches the ideal one ( h > 90%) upon deep SBS saturation, when the reflectance exceeds 90%—95%.
Various aspects of optical phase conjugation are discussed: the properties of the conjugate wave, its potential applications, the basic conjugation methods, and a brief history of the question. The theory for phase conjugation in stimulated scattering is set forth in detail. The basic experimental results on this conjugation method are also discussed in detail. Phase conjugation occurs because that configuration of the back-scattered field which has the conjugate wavefront is amplified to the greatest extent (at a doubled gain) in the intense speckle-inhomogeneous conjugate wave in a medium in which stimulated scattering occurs. Because of the large overall amplification in stimulated scattering, all the other, uncorrelated, configurations of the spontaneously scattered nucleating waves are amplified by a factor of 107 less and are discriminated against. The intervals of values of the various parameters in which the conjugate configuration (the specklon) exists are discussed theoretically, as is the effect of nonlinear selection and saturation on phase conjugation in stimulated scattering. There is a review of experimental results on the first observation of the effect, on the measurement of the angular structure of the uncorrelated waves and of the extent to which they are discriminated against, on the phase fluctuations of the conjugate wave, on the conjugation of subthreshold and depolarized radiation, and on phase conjugation in stimulated scattering in focused beams and for other scattered-wave amplification mechanisms.
Here, we provide physical insight into the nature of this coherent behaviour. We show that it is a manifestation of a phenomenon we term spectral self-phase conjugation (SpSPC), first mentioned in the literature on SBS. It is, as we show, the spectral analogue to well studied spatial self-phase conjugation and like the latter is an inherent property of SBS and of all probability other stimulated scattering phenomena. As such SpSPC provides a unique means by which spectral distortions of an optical beam may be compensated to restore the beam's spectral coherence, in much the same way that spatial self-phase conjugation has been used to restore the spatial coherence of a spatially distorted beam.