Abstract

Water-in-oil microemulsions are stable suspensions of surfactant coated water droplets (often called inverted micelles) embedded in an oil rich continuum. An applied electric field will create an induced dipole in each droplet, which in turn can respond to the applied field via the electrostrictive force.¹ Recent continuous wave degenerate four-wave mixing experiments have shown that it is possible to separate the contributions due to local electrostriction and thermal diffusion in the phase conjugate signal.² We shall present an extension of these studies to probe the dependence of the phase conjugate signal on the size and concentration of the water droplets.

© 1994 IEEE