Abstract

The laser-induced conical emission of radiation in Kerr medium, caused by the process of spatial self-phase modulation, has been investigated experimentally. The experiment was realized for the conditions, when large self-phase modulation was acquired in the absence of self-focusing, which drastically distorts the beam intensity distribution. The first observation of this effect in liquid crystal using cw laser radiation was performed in Ref. ¹. This effect is not observed in a Kerr medium. The interest to the present investigation is connected also with the possibilities to use the effect of spatial self-phase modulation for diagnostics of photon statistics, predicted in Ref. ² for Kerr media.

© 1994 IEEE