Reflection and refraction of light at saturating active boundaries

Peter Hannaford, Krzysztof Sacha

O. N. Gadomskiĭ, Sergey G. Moiseev

Mohammad Azadeh, Lee W. Casperson

This study deals with the topic of reflection and refraction of light from the boundary of a high-gain saturating laser amplifier. Expressions for the electric field and intensity reflection and transmission coefficients are obtained for the case of a wave in a uniform dielectric that is incident normally on a nonlinear saturating active medium. Bistability effects are predicted even for the simplest case of zero frequency detuning from the line centre of the saturating transition.

Manuel Pérez Molina, L. Carretero

In a recent Letter, the reflectance coefficient was used to resolve the sign choice of the wave vector and refractive index in active media. We argue that such a coefficient loses its physical meaning for active media (at real frequencies) when the field amplification is limited only by gain saturation. In this case, the amplitude reflectance coefficient leads to fictitious noncausal reflected fields when the backward Fourier transform is used.

N. M. Lawandy

L. Roso, M. Ll. Pons

The absorption and reflection of a plane wave at the interface of a linear dielectric and a very dense saturable absorber is studied in situations where the linear refractive index has an imaginary part that is much bigger than its real part. In this domain of parameters, computed results calculated without the use of the slowly varying envelope approximation show the presence of a self-reflected wave that eventually might lead to a bistable reflectivity.