General solution of contradirectional two-wave mixing with partially coherent waves in photorefractive crystals

Abstract

We investigate contradirectional two-wave mixing with partially coherent waves in photorefractive crystals. By use of a statistical theory on linear systems, a general formulation of the problem in the space and frequency domain is derived and implemented numerically. We obtain results on beam intensity and mutual coherence. The results on the enhancement of mutual coherence are compared with previous theoretical results on simpler cases and with experimental measurements. Excellent agreements are achieved. The results also indicate that the effective interaction length can be significantly longer than the coherence length of the waves. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.