Abstract

Phase conjugate reflectivity of the photorefractive four-wave mixing system is usually quite unstable and it is serious issue for practical use of these systems. The cause of this instability is mainly combination of the fluctuation of the phases of input signal and pump beams and the slow response time of the photorefractive crystal. When all input beams in the four-wave mixing system are mutually coherent and the phases of the input beams are not stable, four kinds of gratings are compete each other and the phase conjugate output becomes quite unstable. To avoid this problem, we can make one of the pump incoherent to the signal and another pump¹. The phase conjugate output is, however, still unstable due to the rewriting of the grating caused by the fluctuation of the phase of the input beams. In this paper, we report our feedback system to stabilize the power of the phase conjugate output from the four-wave mixing system by controlling the phase of the signal beam. In this system, we detect the phase difference between signal and forward pump beam with lock-in amplifier and control the phase of the signal with a piezoelectric mirror to stabilize the phase difference.

© 1996 IEEE