Abstract
It is well known that stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) can produce phase conjugate reflections of laser radiation1. Although there have been a great number of theoretical papers published which discuss the experimental conditions required to achieve a high fidelity of conjugation from the backscattered Brillouin wave2,3, there has been relatively little experimental work which studies the laser parameters necessary for obtaining high quality phase conjugate reflections from SBS mirrors. Most experiments which purport, to study SBS phase conjugate mirrors (PCM's) use lasers which have linewidths considerably greater than the linewidth of the scattered radiation and in some cases comparable to the Brillouin frequency shift. Most theoretical modeling of SBS PCM's assumes infinitely narrow laser and scattered linewidths. While there have been some theoretical attempts to investigate the behaviour of the SBS phase conjugation process on the laser linewidth4,5, the predictions are inconclusive. Indeed one theoretical work5 (refuted in Ref 6) predicts that wide bandwidth pump radiation actually increases the quality of the phase conjugation obtainable from SBS. Clearly there is a need for a quantative experimental study of the dependence on laser linewidth of the properties and in particular the fidelity of phase conjugation produced by SBS. Because of the coherent nature of the process one expects the laser coherence length to be crucial in determining the fidelity of conjugation obtainable from SBS. In this paper we present experimental measurements of the SBS efficiency and phase conjugate fidelity (PCF) obtainable as a function of the focal length of the focusing lens, the linewidth and power of the pump beam.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
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