Abstract

Brillouin enhanced four-wave mixing (BEFWM) is a judicious combination of SBS and FWM processes. Very high phase conjugate reflectivity (>10⁶) has been reported. Various conditions have been presented that lead to these high reflectivities, but all those discussions are based on a single mode laser. Here we report the experimental results of BEFWM with a multimode laser. The laser mode spacing is 0.15 GHz, which is larger than the linewidth of the acoustic phonon (0.1 GHz), so we can neglect the gratings that are not resonant with the acoustic frequency. We observed that the phase conjugate reflectivity is smaller for the multimode pump. Assume there is no coupling between modes through BEFWM and each mode interacts with the nonlinear medium independently. It has been shown that the reflectivity will decrease as the input pump power decreases. Thus the reflectivity of a single mode pump is higher than the resultant reflectivity from a multimode pump. Further examination of the temporal profiles of the probe and phase conjugate pulses in the multimode case shows that the pulse modulation depth is decreased in the phase conjugate pulse.

© 1992 Optical Society of America