Recent interest in degenerate four-wave mixing in artificial Kerr media to produce phase conjugate waves has concentrated on the visible and infrared spectra. Attempts to extend this technique to the millimeter wave and microwave spectral regions encounter severe difficulties arising from the requirements of medium nonlinearity and high beam intensities. The former problem may be solved by the use of artificial Kerr media and the latter by confinement in a waveguide. In a single-mode waveguide, however, wavefront perturbations cannot propagate. Phase conjugation therefore reduces in this case to a 1-D conjugation capable only of correcting for longitudinal phase error. Observation of this conjugate wave with a slow response medium is made possible by using a sequential method. The general concept is to first write the nonlinear refractive index grating using counterpropagating pump and probe waves. Subsequently, both waves are turned off, and a pump wave approaching from the opposite side reads (scatters from) the grating to produce the phase conjugate wave.
Recent interest in degenerate four-wave mixing in artificial Kerr media to produce phase conjugate waves has concentrated on the visible and infrared spectra. Attempts to extend this technique to the millimeter wave and microwave spectral regions encounter severe difficulties arising from the requirements of medium nonlinearity and high beam intensities. The former problem may be solved by the use of artificial Kerr media and the latter by confinement in a waveguide. In a single-mode waveguide, however, wavefront perturbations cannot propagate. Phase conjugation therefore reduces in this case to a 1-D conjugation capable only of correcting for longitudinal phase error. Observation of this conjugate wave with a slow response medium is made possible by using a sequential method. The general concept is to first write the nonlinear refractive index grating using counterpropagating pump and probe waves. Subsequently, both waves are turned off, and a pump wave approaching from the opposite side reads (scatters from) the grating to produce the phase conjugate wave.
According to the theory of two-beam coupling in a thick Kerr medium, which is based on the firstorder coupled-wave method,1 the energy exchange between the two incident beams is forbidden because the phase shift between the intensity grating and refractive-index grating is zero in the Kerr media. The energy exchange must be achieved by artificially creating a phase shift, e.g., by moving the intensity grating with respect to the medium at a speed of the order of one fringe per response time of the medium.
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].
We consider degenerate four-wave mixing in a Kerr medium with a standard noncollinear geometry and the polarization directions of all the beams parallel to one another. The two pump beams, the probe beam, and the phase-conjugate beam are denoted by the subscripts 1,2,4 and 3, respectively. The nonlinear medium is placed between z = 0 and z = 1; the values of the intensities of the beams at z = 0 and 1 are denoted by Ii0 andIi1, where i = 1,2,3,4. Beams 2 and 4 are incident at z = 1; and beam 1 is incident at z = 0. We have determined the dependence of the phase-conjugate reflectivity R = I31/I41 and the pump transmission T = I11/I10 on the following parameters: the probe ratio, q=I41/(I10 + I21); the pump ratio, r = I21/I 1 0; the absorption coefficient–path length product, al; and the coupling constant of the medium, q. In the absence of nonlinear refraction, pump depletion, and linear absorption in the medium, R = tan2q. When all of these effects are taken into account, the maximum value of R is given by Rmax = exp (-2α1)/(q(1 + r)). The minimum value that T can reach is proportional to q for q < 1. Even for small values of q, multistable solutions for R and T are obtained when q is greater than a threshold value, which we denote by qth. We have determined the dependence of qth on the parameters q and r.
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
This paper presents an exact solution to the slowly varying envelope equations for the probe and signal fluxes in degenerate four-wave mixing in Kerr media. The analysis is performed for a noncollinear geometry, and all beams have the same linear polarization in the nonlinear medium. It is assumed that the angle separating the directions of the counterpropagating pumps and probe and signal beams is large enough so that cross-coupled waves do not contribute to the envelope equations describing the spatial evolution of the pump, probe, and signal beams. Multiple values of the transmitted probe are obtained for equal pump fluxes above a threshold determined by the nonlinear phase shift in the medium. Significant pump depletion occurs in this regime, but it can also occur without the appearance of multiple solutions. Since exact optical phase conjugation occurs only in the limit where the pumps are undepleted in Kerr media, this result implies that there are fundamental upper limits on the pump intensity that can be used to increase signal reflectivities in optical phase conjugation.
A calculation procedure and various large-signal and numerical solutions are presented for degenerate four-wave mixing in optical Kerr media, and for phase conjugate resonators using degenerate four-wave mixing. The solutions presented take full account of nonlinear refractive index changes, pump depletion, signal saturation, distributed losses, and possible external mirrors with laser gain. We find that including the nonlinear index change generally causes little change in the reflectivity or power output of degenerate four-wave mixing devices, at least with symmetric pumping. The optimum power output from a phase conjugate resonator with and without a laser gain medium is calculated. The results provide some theoretical guidance for designing phase conjugate resonators.
PACS Code 42. 65. Bp; 42. 60. Da