Abstract

There has recently been great interest in the instabilities that can occur in the interaction of two laser beams in a nonlinear medium. Silberberg and Bar-Joseph¹ have predicted the existence of instabilities in the propagation of two scalar waves for the case of a Kerr medium characterized by a nonzero response time. Marburger and Lam,² Kaplan and Law,³ and Lytel⁴ have shown that multistability can occur in the transmission of two counterpropagating vector fields in a medium with an infinitely fast response. In this paper, we show theoretically that instabilities occur in the polarization characteristics of counterpropagating vector fields for an infinitely fast Kerr medium. Our treatment includes the time evolution of the transmitted optical fields; previous workers^2–4 have concentrated on the steady-state response.

© 1985 Optical Society of America