We study phase-conjugate degenerate four-wave mixing (DFWM) in an optically pumped, two-level atomic system (the
3s2S1∕2,
F=2, ${m}_{F}=2\ensuremath{\rightarrow}3p\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}^{2}P_{3∕2}$,
F=3,
mF=3 transition in a diffuse, collision-free, thermal beam of sodium) using phase-modulated laser beams. In this investigation, we study the detailed line shape of the four-wave mixing signal as a function of the temporal delay between the probe field and the pump fields at different intensities of the cw pump waves and modulation frequencies. We show that phase modulation of the pump and probe beams leads to strong amplitude modulation of the phase-conjugate beam and report excellent agreement between our experimental observations of the DFWM spectra and the results of numerical calculations. Our numerical results suggest an enhancement of the ``local'' DFWM signal when the sidebands of the phase-modulated laser are resonant with dressed-state transitions, but that this resonance is less obvious in the total signal generated. We also show that the complex line shapes depend sensitively upon the delay of the probe beam, with the peak DFWM signal occurring when the probe beam is advanced compared to the pump beam.
Brillouin enhanced four-wave mixing (BEFWM) is a judicious combination of SBS and FWM processes. Very high phase conjugate reflectivity (>106) has been reported. Various conditions have been presented that lead to these high reflectivities, but all those discussions are based on a single mode laser. Here we report the experimental results of BEFWM with a multimode laser. The laser mode spacing is 0.15 GHz, which is larger than the linewidth of the acoustic phonon (0.1 GHz), so we can neglect the gratings that are not resonant with the acoustic frequency. We observed that the phase conjugate reflectivity is smaller for the multimode pump. Assume there is no coupling between modes through BEFWM and each mode interacts with the nonlinear medium independently. It has been shown that the reflectivity will decrease as the input pump power decreases. Thus the reflectivity of a single mode pump is higher than the resultant reflectivity from a multimode pump. Further examination of the temporal profiles of the probe and phase conjugate pulses in the multimode case shows that the pulse modulation depth is decreased in the phase conjugate pulse.