Abstract

Analytic theories generally agree that optical wave front conjugation occurs in stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) because the component of back- scattered light conjugate to a spatially inhomogeneous pump wave will grow at approximately twice the rate of any random orthogonal modes.¹ They disagree, however, on why some of the backscatter remains unconjugated, even in the high-gain regime where the conjugate fraction or fidelity H should approach unity. This is an important question because even a small residue of un- conjugated light (e.g., 1 — H~ 1 %) can cause serious beam distortion in the near field of the phase aberrator. Here we examine the parameters that affect the SBS conjugation fidelity in a multimode optical waveguide using a 2-D nonlinear propagation code (BOUNCE) that includes pump depletion. The key results to be discussed are summarized below.

© 1983 Optical Society of America