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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Grating phase in mutually pumped phase conjugators

William R. Christian, Ragini Saxena, Ian C. McMichael

Published Jan 1, 1989• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Much attention is focused on the mutually pumped phase conjugators (MPPCs). Their unique ability to operate with mutually incoherent pumping beams makes them ideal candidates for applications in communications, laser locking, fiber optic gyros, and optical information processing. In the simple physical picture of MPPCs, the conjugate beams result from gratings that form between each pump beam and amplified scattering from that pump beam. Therefore, one might expect that the phase of the grating is determined by the relative phase between the pumping beams and their scattering. That is, the scattering acts as a seed beam that interferes with the pumping beam to determine the phase of the grating. The situation is complicated by the possibility of moving gratings, multiple reflections, and the sharing of holograms written simultaneously by both pump beams and their corresponding scattering. The problem of MPPC driven by an external seed beam was analyzed by Kroli- kowski et al.1 They predicted temporal instabilities for low intensity seed beams and stable solutions for high intensity seed beams. However, it has not been demonstrated (at least experimentally) that a seed beam can control the phase of the diffracted beam without destroying its conjugate nature. To investigate this question, we have set up a MPPC with a variable (phase and amplitude) seed beam and an interferometer to measure the relative phase between an incident and diffracted beam, and thus the phase of the grating. The same interferometer is used to determine whether the seed beam is influencing the wavefront of the diffracted beam and therefore destroying the conjugation process. This effect might be used as a nonmechanical means of biasing phase conjugate interferometers.

DOI
10.1364/oam.1989.tux1

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Much attention is focused on the mutually pumped phase conjugators (MPPCs). Their unique ability to operate with mutually incoherent pumping beams makes them ideal candidates for applications in communications, laser locking, fiber optic gyros, and optical information processing. In the simple physical picture of MPPCs, the conjugate beams result from gratings that form between each pump beam and amplified scattering from that pump beam. Therefore, one might expect that the phase of the grating is determined by the relative phase between the pumping beams and their scattering. That is, the scattering acts as a seed beam that interferes with the pumping beam to determine the phase of the grating. The situation is complicated by the possibility of moving gratings, multiple reflections, and the sharing of holograms written simultaneously by both pump beams and their corresponding scattering. The problem of MPPC driven by an external seed beam was analyzed by Kroli- kowski et al.1 They predicted temporal instabilities for low intensity seed beams and stable solutions for high intensity seed beams. However, it has not been demonstrated (at least experimentally) that a seed beam can control the phase of the diffracted beam without destroying its conjugate nature. To investigate this question, we have set up a MPPC with a variable (phase and amplitude) seed beam and an interferometer to measure the relative phase between an incident and diffracted beam, and thus the phase of the grating. The same interferometer is used to determine whether the seed beam is influencing the wavefront of the diffracted beam and therefore destroying the conjugation process. This effect might be used as a nonmechanical means of biasing phase conjugate interferometers.
We present theoretical and experimental studies of mutually pumped phase conjugation when a seed beam is injected that is the conjugate of one of the pumping beams. Good agreement exists between the theoretical and the experimental functional dependencies of the conjugate reflectivities on seed-beam intensity. However, the calculated gain is lower than that measured by two-beam coupling by nearly a factor of 2. We found that the seed-to-pump intensity ratio needs to exceed approximately 10−6, greater than 100 times the scattering, before the phase of the grating in the mutually pumped phase conjugator will follow the phase of the seed beam when it is varied by a moving mirror.
Based on the four-wave mixing mechanism and light fanning effect, a mutually pumped phase conjugator(MPPC) model is proposed to analyze the variation of MPPC output response with time for different scattering seed value. It shows that preset grating can enhance the fan light intensity when it satisfies Bragg condition and also can shorten MPPC response time. In experiment the bird-wings MPPC is done with or without the preset grating and the variation of MPPC reflectivity with time is obtained in two cases, and simulation conclusion is in agreement with the experimental result. These results have importance for applications of MPPC on optical heterodyne detection.
Several mutually pumped phase conjugation configurations have been experimentally demonstrated and theoretically studied in photorefractive media.1 Although these materials are very efficient at low operating power, the process is inherently slow due to the need to generate a large number of photo-induced charge carriers.2 This paper examines the possibility of the same process occurring in a transparent Kerr medium which offers the advantage of faster response times. Due to an electrostrictive nonlinearity in the medium, a photon from either of the two input beams can be spontaneously converted into a frequency downshifted Stokes photon and an acoustic phonon, a process better known as Brillouin scattering.3 The presence of phonons due to noise will also help in Stokes scattering the incident photons. Each pair of incident beam and its coherently generated scattered beam will then write a grating that is moving at the phonon velocity. Reading of this moving hologram by the other incoherent input beam may generate the cross-readout phase conjugated beam that is frequency shifted from the read beam by the frequency of the acoustic field. The nonlinear medium thus acts like a phase conjugate mirror to both of the incident beams. Since the read-write processes occur simultaneously, the dynamics of the beam coupling are described by NFWM equations in the nonlinear medium with appropriate boundary conditions. Our calculations show that it is indeed possible to phase conjugate the two mutually incoherent input beams simultaneously when the coupling strength is above a threshold value. If one of the input beams is very weak compared to the other input beam, it is phase conjugated with a very high reflection coefficient. We have also examined the effects of seeding the phase conjugated beams.
Mutually pumped phase conjugation, a process by which two incident laser beams can mutually pump each other to generate the phase-conjugate replica of the other beam, is studied in a transparent Kerr medium with an electrostrictive nonlinearity. The nonlinear medium acts as a phase-conjugating mirror to both of the incident beams and generates their Stokes-shifted phase-conjugated outputs by the nearly degenerate four-wave mixing process. Our results show that this process will occur only if the coupling strength, defined by the product of the Kerr amplitude gain coefficient, the total input intensity, and the interaction length, is above the threshold value of 2. If the intensity of one of the input beams exceeds the threshold value and the second input beam is weaker than the first, then the weak beam is phase conjugated with a large reflectivity that has a maximum value of the intensity ratio of the strong to the weak input beam. For negligible absorption in the medium, a complete transfer of energy of both the incident beams into the phase-conjugate beams can occur for finite interaction lengths that are only slightly larger than the threshold value. Seeding the oscillation beams tends to lower the phase-conjugate power reflectivities, probably because of increased contribution from the competing two-wave mixing process.
Based on the four-wave mixing mechanism and fanning effect, the threshold coupling constant for mutually pumped phase conjugator (MPPC) with one interaction region and two interaction regions is studied in theory. The relation of the the threshold coupling strength for MPPC and the fanning intensity is studied. Due to the more efficient fanning, preset grating in MPPC has the ability to reduce threshold coupling constant and improve output efficiency. These characteristics predicted by theory have been used to explain the previous experiment phenomenon. The dependence of threshold coupling constants for MPPC on the amplitude ratio of incident pump beams is presented. The threshold coupling constant for one-interaction-region MPPC is lower than that for two-interaction-regions MPPC.
Phase conjugate reflectivity of the photorefractive four-wave mixing system is usually quite unstable and it is serious issue for practical use of these systems. The cause of this instability is mainly combination of the fluctuation of the phases of input signal and pump beams and the slow response time of the photorefractive crystal. When all input beams in the four-wave mixing system are mutually coherent and the phases of the input beams are not stable, four kinds of gratings are compete each other and the phase conjugate output becomes quite unstable. To avoid this problem, we can make one of the pump incoherent to the signal and another pump1. The phase conjugate output is, however, still unstable due to the rewriting of the grating caused by the fluctuation of the phase of the input beams. In this paper, we report our feedback system to stabilize the power of the phase conjugate output from the four-wave mixing system by controlling the phase of the signal beam. In this system, we detect the phase difference between signal and forward pump beam with lock-in amplifier and control the phase of the signal with a piezoelectric mirror to stabilize the phase difference.