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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Detection of phase-modulated optical signals through two-wave mixing in photorefractive materials

L. Boutsikaris, Fred Davidson

Published Jan 1, 1988• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Two-wave mixing in photorefractive crystals has been shown to combine coherently a modulated optical signal beam with a strong pump optical field.’ For a phase-modulated signal beam, the induced index of refraction phase grating inside the crystal yields a coupling of the optical fields of the pump and signal so that subsequent intensity detection results in apparent intensity modulation of the transmitted signal or pump beams. This provides an easy way to detect phase differences between two optical beams. Some of the advantages the above scheme offers over commonly used coherent optical phase detection schemes are: no loss of 3 dB in the signal beam intensity at the 50/50 beam splitter (used to combine signal and local oscillator fields); automatic alignment of the index of refraction grating with the two incident optical wavefronts; insensitivity to slow random changes in the phases of both beams. Experimental results are given, and a new definition for the resulting mixing gain for the phase-modulated beam is introduced, through which optimal conditions for input beam intensity ratios can be found. Applications to coherent homodyne detection are discussed.

DOI
10.1364/oam.1988.mk1

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Journal of the Optical Society of America B•Dec 1, 1992•8 citations
Two-wave mixing in photorefractive crystals has been shown to combine coherently a modulated optical signal beam with a strong pump optical field.’ For a phase-modulated signal beam, the induced index of refraction phase grating inside the crystal yields a coupling of the optical fields of the pump and signal so that subsequent intensity detection results in apparent intensity modulation of the transmitted signal or pump beams. This provides an easy way to detect phase differences between two optical beams. Some of the advantages the above scheme offers over commonly used coherent optical phase detection schemes are: no loss of 3 dB in the signal beam intensity at the 50/50 beam splitter (used to combine signal and local oscillator fields); automatic alignment of the index of refraction grating with the two incident optical wavefronts; insensitivity to slow random changes in the phases of both beams. Experimental results are given, and a new definition for the resulting mixing gain for the phase-modulated beam is introduced, through which optimal conditions for input beam intensity ratios can be found. Applications to coherent homodyne detection are discussed.
Photorefractively induced index-of-refraction phase gratings are shown to combine coherently the optical fields of a strong pump and a suitably amplitude- or phase-modulated signal beam in such a way that an apparent amplification of the modulating waveform appears as intensity modulation of the transmitted signal and pump beam intensities. The source of the signal gain is shown to be the square-law (intensity) detection of the coherently combined pump and modulated signal beams, just as in coherent optical communication systems in which a strong local-oscillator field is coherently added with a weak optical signal field by a beam splitter.
Two-wave mixing allows one to change effectively Intensities, phases, space profiles, polarizations and time evolution of interacting beams [1,21. We will show, that two-wave mixing of partially coherent beams may be used to increase degree of coherence of these beams. The physics of the effect under discussion is as follows: two partially coherent beams write a refraction index grating in a nonlinear medium whose position and profile are practically stationary. Scattering of strong beam on this grating in the direction of the weak one means that this weak beam acquires an addition, that is coherent with the strong beam, thereby increasing degree of coherence of the beams. Similar effects were discussed in connection with scattering of different frequency components at the common running grating [3] and with Interaction of different polarization components [4,5].
When a weak optical signal is injected in a photorefractive crystal illuminated with a strong pump beam, it experiences gain via a two-wave mixing process.(1) A problem common to these amplifiers is the presence of noise sources that corrupt the quality of the emerging amplified optical signal. We propose and experimentally demonstrate the first technique, to our knowledge, capable of very significantly reducing the optical noise while maintaining high gain coefficients. Consider two-wave mixing in a slowly rotating crystal. First, we estimate the influence of a crystal rotation (angular velocity Ω around the point O) on the noise intensity in the output plane (Fig. 1a). A noise source located around point A radiates a complex wavefront whose component along the direction of the injected signal is represented by a plane wave of intensity IN (A is a crystal imperfection or interface). It is essential to note that the noise sources are bounded to the crystal and will consequently move with it. This is the basis for the process of discrimination between the noise gratings and the injected signal grating. In the Ox coordinate bounded to the rotating crystal, the interference pattern responsible for the formation of a noise grating around the point A is given by: IN(x,t) = I0 [1 + mN cos KN(t)x], where KN(t) ~ 2π(θ + Ωt)/λ is the time-dependent grating wave vector (we have assumed that the angles inside the crystal are small), I0 is the total incident intensity (I0 ~ IP0), θ is the angle between the beams inside the crystal, λ = λ0/n is the optical wavelength in the crystal with refractive index n, and mN is the fringe modulation.
Phase-sensitive detection can be realized optically by using degenerate four-wave mixing in photorefractive materials. Phase-sensitive detectors or lock-in amplifiers use a reference-triggered phase-sensitive mixer followed by a time-integrating low-pass filter. Mixing the two signals gives sum- and difference-frequency outputs, and a low-pass filter extracts the difference frequency. The phase encoded in the photorefractive hologram relative to the reference beam provides the mixing, and the response time of photorefractive material provides the time integration. Correctly modulating only the phase of the reference beam at a period much shorter than the photorefractive response time eliminates the phase-conjugate beam. Then modulating the phase of the signal input beam in the same waveform, but at a slightly different frequency from the reference, produces an oscillating phase-conjugate intensity. When the modulation frequencies of the two beams are phase-locked, a stable phase-conjugate signal is obtained with an intensity determined by the relative phase shift. These optical phase-sensitive detection experiments agree with calculations from dynamic photorefractive theory for the phase-conjugate intensity.
We develop a numerical method to solve the coupled-wave equations for four-wave mixing phase conjugation in a photorefractive crystal with unequal complex coupling constants; by this method we can obtain both the intensities and the phases of various beams. We discuss the intensities and the phases of the interacting beams in a photorefractive crystal for the cases in which the phase shifts between the refractive-index gratings and the interference pattern are all π/2 and in which they are not all π/2.