Abstract

Consider the coupling between two trains of mode-locked pulses in a photorefractive crystal. Let each optical pulse be so weak that it takes a large number of pulses to built up a quasi-steady-state refractive-index grating in the crystal. In this case the shape of the pulses will change as the result of beam coupling.¹ The temporal pulse shape changes for two reasons. First, interference between the diffracted pulse and the transmitted pulse alters the pulse shape, as shown in Fig. 1. Second, only a portion of each pulse's full frequency spectrum is diffracted by the volume photorefractive grating.

© 1991 Optical Society of America