Abstract

Temporally and spectrally-resolved degenerate four-wave-mixing (FWM) techniques have been enormously successful in providing new information about fundamental nonlinear and coherent optical processes in atomic, molecular and solid state systems. Typically, in such studies, the time-integrated or time-resolved magnitude of the FWM emission (or its spectrum) is studied as a function of the input parameters (such as the fluence, time delays or the polarization states of the incident pulses), but the polarization state of the FWM signal itself has been largely ignored. Moreover, the few attempts that have been made to determine the polarization state of the FWM emission have been restricted to measuring the direction of polarization, but they have left the ellipticity and the degree to which the signal is unpolarized unspecified.

© 1996 Optical Society of America