Abstract
Recently second-harmonic (SH) generation has received a considerable renewal of interest, in view of its potential application for generating large nonlinear phase shifts via cascading,1 or coherent (phase-controlled) switching.2 So far the approach to the problem was essentially based on the scalar coupled-mode equations solved by Armstrong et al. in the sixties.3 However the inclusion of the polarization in the description of the process leads to an increased number of waves and hence to conceive new potential applications for signal processing. Here, we predict that the vectorial interaction of the fundamental frequency (FF) and the SH may lead to the onset of spatial (Hamiltonian) chaos. The stochastic behavior poses limitations on the potential exploitation of the FF-SH interaction. Within these limitations we propose new stable operations such as polarization switching of an intense FF beam controlled by a weak SH beam. In order to reduce the complexity to the essential we consider here a specific case, namely the coherent coupling of a single scalar SH field (say E2), and two (generally mismatched) polarization components of the FF field (say E01, E02), governed by the coupled-mode equations4
© 1994 Optical Society of America
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