Temporal modulation instabilities of counterpropagating waves in a finite dispersive Kerr medium. II. Application to Fabry{endash}Perot cavities
- Department of Mechanical Engineering and Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627 (United States)
- The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627 (United States)
Absolute instabilities of counterpropagating pump beams in a dispersive Kerr medium, placed inside a Fabry{endash}Perot cavity, are analytically studied by use of the analysis and the results of part I [J. Opt. Soc. B {bold 14}, {bold 607} (1998)]. Our approach allows characterization of such a complicated nonlinear system in terms of a doubly resonant optical parametric oscillator. We consider the growth of modulation-instability sidebands associated with each pump beam when weak probe signals are injected through one of the mirrors of the Fabry{endash}Perot cavity. The results are used to obtain the threshold condition for the onset of the absolute instability and the growth rate for the unstable sidebands in the above-threshold regime. As expected, the well-known Ikeda instability is recovered at low modulation frequencies. The effects of the group-velocity dispersion are found to become quite important at high modulation frequencies. Although the absolute instability dominates in the anomalous-dispersion regime, it exists even in the normal-dispersion regime of the nonlinear medium. Below the instability threshold, our analysis provides analytic expressions for the probe transmittivity and the reflectivity of the phase-conjugated signal that is generated through a four-wave-mixing process. {copyright} 1998 Optical Society of America
- OSTI ID:
- 613991
- Journal Information:
- Journal of the Optical Society of America, Part B: Optical Physics, Vol. 15, Issue 2; Other Information: PBD: Feb 1998
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Transverse modulational instability of counterpropagating light waves
Traveling wave model of a multimode Fabry-Perot laser in free running and external cavity configurations