Temporal Instabilities Of Spatially Stable Counterpropagating Vector Fields

Alexander L. Gaeta; Robert W. Boyd

doi:10.1117/12.967370

1 January 1987 Temporal Instabilities Of Spatially Stable Counterpropagating Vector Fields

Alexander L. Gaeta, Robert W. Boyd

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 0813, Optics and the Information Age; (1987) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.967370
Event: 14th Congress of the International Commission for Optics, 1987, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

The simple optical interaction of two counterpropagating waves in a nonlinear medium with no exter-nal feedback has been shown to exhibit complicated behavior. Silberberg and Bar-Joseph [1] have shown that that in the scalar approximation the output of two waves counterpropagating in a nonlinear Kerr medium whose response time is approximately equal to the transit time of the light through the medium can exhibit oscillatory and chaotic behavior in time. The origin of this instability arises from gain at the sidemodes of the two strong waves which in turn experience distributed feedback (DFB) due to the standing-wave pattern created by the two strong waves. The steady-state behavior of the polarizations of counterpropagating waves in a nonlinear Kerr medium has been shown to be quite complex [2,3]. However, for an isotropic Kerr medium there exist in steady-state four polarization configurations for the two beams that do not change upon propagation through the material [4]. Wabnitz and Gregori [5] have shown that only two of these these eigenpolarizations will be spatially stable in steady-state; the stable polarizations are those in which both fields are linearly polarized with parallel polarizations and in which the fields are circularly polarized and corotating. In this paper we will demonstrate that one these spatially stable eigenpolarizations is actually temporally unstable.

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Alexander L. Gaeta and Robert W. Boyd "Temporal Instabilities Of Spatially Stable Counterpropagating Vector Fields", Proc. SPIE 0813, Optics and the Information Age, (1 January 1987); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.967370

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