The transient response of Kerr-like phase conjugators is treated and reviewed. The cases of cw and transient pump waves are considered. A general formalism is derived, with application to specific cases such as pulse reshaping, chirp reversal, and temporal reversal of optical waveforms.
In this paper we develop the interrelationships between the steady-state and transient behavior for cw-pumped Kerr-like conjugators in which the optical Kerr effect is considered to respond instantaneously. We use Laplace-transform techniques to develop an expression for the conjugate response to input pulses of arbitrary form. For stable conjugator operation (in which the cw conjugate reflectivity is finite for all input frequencies), the expression reduces to an antilinear Fourier-transform relationship, which is readily adaptable to computer simulation. The cw filter function of Pepper and Abrams [Opt. Lett. 3, 312 (1978)] is found to play a central role. We show, both numerically and analytically, that our calculated delta-function response agrees with that previously published. We numerically demonstrate temporal spreading and reshaping when the conjugator transit time becomes equal to or longer than the duration of the input pulse, and we show numerically the perfect chirp reversal for sufficiently thin conjugators and the deviations from perfect chirp reversal upon increasing the thickness of the conjugator. These numerical results can be understood in terms of the bandwidth of the associated cw filter function.
We explore dynamic media, such as plasmas and photorefractive materials, as generators of phase conjugated replicas of transient optical signals via four-wave mixing. The characterizing element of dynamic media is a population of free charge carriers that leads to induced charge density gratings on probe illumination. In steady-state conditions, phase conjugation in such media normally appears with smaller pump intensities than are required in Kerr media but at the expense of potentially slow response times.1