Abstract

Two-wave mixing, or coherent beam combination, is of considerable interest to the nonlinear optics and laser physics communities. One approach, of particular interest to this study, involves irradiating an optical Kerr media with two nondegenerate laser beams. The finite response time of the Kerr material ensures that any laser-induced grating will lag the interference pattern formed by the two nondegenerate laser beams and thereby allow energy transfer from the high-frequency beam to the low-frequency one. For such media, thermal light scattering fluctuations give rise to thermal noise gratings which can transfer energy from one wave to the other. Since such gratings are random in nature, their effect is to introduce fluctuations in the two-wave mixing process itself. We examine the influence of such thermal noise gratings on two-wave mixing and determine the SNR for this process in the nondepleted pump approximation.

© 1988 Optical Society of America