Abstract

Self-pulsation and chaotic behavior have been observed in a self-pumped barium titanate phase conjugate mirror.^1,2 We find that the characteristics of the attractor on which the system evolves depend critically on the following properties of the pump beam: (1) the degree of focusing, (2) the angle between the propagation direction and the crystalline caxis, (3) the location on the crystal face at which the beam enters, and (4) the input power. We have modeled our experiment by extending the theory of MacDonald and Feinberg³ of self-pumped phase conjugation due to four-wave mixing in two coupled interaction regions to include the effects of time-varying optical fields and the finite response time of the nonlinear medium. We find that this model predicts unstable operation of a self-pumped phase conjugate mirror that is similar to that observed in the experiment.

© 1986 Optical Society of America