Abstract

There is a good potential for efficient four- wave-mixing (PWM) in a laser gain medium due to the strong amplification of the interacting beams together with the resonant nonlinearity of gain saturation. An early attempt to demonstrate phase conjugation by gain saturation in Nd:YAG by Tomita¹ achieved only poor efficiency (reflectivity of 0.1 % and 1 µj of conjugate energy ). Bel'gyugin et al² more recently demonstrated interesting results of self-pumped phase conjugate mirrors using solid-state media, although conjugate reflectivity in the reversed direction, is not particularly high.

© 1993 Optical Society of America