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European Quantum Electronics Conference (EQEC)

Honeycomb pattern formation by laser-beam filamentation in atomic sodium vapor

Ryan S. Bennink, V. Wong, A.M. Marino, David L. Aronstein, Robert W. Boyd, Carlos R. Stroud, Svetlana G. Lukishova, Daniel J. Gauthier

Published Jan 1, 2003• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This study presents examples of observed optical pattern formation in which a single laser beam propagating through atomic sodium vapor without feedback develops a stable, regular transverse structure. In particular, a three-filament near-field pattern leading to a honeycomb far-field pattern occurs at intensities near the saturation intensity and at powers larger than (but of the order of magnitude of) the critical power for self-focusing. The three-filament pattern has a uniform phase profile and strongly correlated power fluctuations, which suggest that it is perhaps a quantum image. These observations are also found to be in good agreement with numerical simulations of filamentation in a two-level atomic medium.

DOI
10.1109/eqec.2003.1313969

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This study presents examples of observed optical pattern formation in which a single laser beam propagating through atomic sodium vapor without feedback develops a stable, regular transverse structure. In particular, a three-filament near-field pattern leading to a honeycomb far-field pattern occurs at intensities near the saturation intensity and at powers larger than (but of the order of magnitude of) the critical power for self-focusing. The three-filament pattern has a uniform phase profile and strongly correlated power fluctuations, which suggest that it is perhaps a quantum image. These observations are also found to be in good agreement with numerical simulations of filamentation in a two-level atomic medium.
We have observed transverse pattern formation leading to highly regular structures in both the near and far fields when a near-resonant laser beam propagates without feedback through an atomic sodium vapor. One example is a regular far-field honeycomb pattern, which results from the transformation of the laser beam within the vapor into a stable three-lobed structure with a uniform phase distribution and highly correlated power fluctuations. The predictions of a theoretical model of the filamentation process are in good agreement with these observations.
There are abundant nonlinear effects in atomic vapor. In this paper, the phenomenon of laser breaking up into filaments is studied in the near-resonant rubidium atomic vapor，which is induced by the strong nonlinear Kerr effect. When the continuous-wave laser beam with transverse Gaussian distribution passes through the atomic vapor, the pattern arising from the coherent superposition of the diffraction patterns of filaments is observed. We also investigated the influence on the mode pattern by input power of laser, the temperature of the vapor cell and the frequency detuning of pump light. Due to the hyperfine structure of rubidium atoms, the four-wave mixing effect exists in hot rubidium atomic vapor, which is related to the third-order nonlinear effect closely. The Raman gain of the Stokes and anti-Stokes photons is observed by scanning the frequency of the probe beam.
We report observations of self-focusing and filamentation, i.e., the formation of one or more self-trapped beams, of \ensuremath{\sim}3 ns laser pulses in strontium (Sr) vapor. The experimental arrangement consists of a Sr vapor cell and a pulsed neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet pumped dye laser tuned to the blue of the 461 nm transition in Sr. The spatial intensity distribution of individual self-focused beams has been measured at the exit window of a vapor cell by using a magnifying lens and video camera. Measurements of power dependence, spatial distributions, and scaling behavior for filament formation are in good agreement with theory over a wide range of vapor densities, laser detunings, and laser powers. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
We report steady-state self-focusing, self-trapping, and self-defocusing of a cw dye laser beam in sodium vapor for frequencies within several Doppler widths of the DDD-line resonance transitions. We measured the variation of the beam profile as the light propagates through the vapor. We observed a 20-mW beam self-trapped in a 12-cm-long filament having a half-power diameter of 70 \ensuremath{\mu}m.
The development of spontaneous stationary equilibrium patterns induced by the injection of a laser pump field into a purely absorptive two-level atomic sodium vapour ring cavity is investigated by means of various weakly non-linear stability analyses applied to the appropriate governing evolution equation for this optical phenomenon. In the quasi-equilibrium limit for its atomic variables, the mathematical system modelling that phenomenon can be reduced to a single modified Swift–Hohenberg non-linear partial differential time-evolution equation describing the intracavity field on an unbounded 2D spatial domain. Diffraction of radiation can induce transverse patterns consisting of stripes, squares and hexagonal arrays of bright spots or honeycombs in an initially uniform plane-wave configuration. Then, these theoretical predictions are compared with both relevant experimental evidence and existing numerical simulations from some recent non-linear optical pattern formation studies.
We report steady-state self-focusing, self-trapping, and self-defocusing of a cw dye laser beam in sodium vapor for frequencies within several Doppler widths of the DDD-line resonance transitions. We measured the variation of the beam profile as the light propagates through the vapor. We observed a 20-mW beam self-trapped in a 12-cm-long filament having a half-power diameter of 70 \ensuremath{\mu}m.