No Arabic abstract
We suggest a scheme to manipulate paraxial diffraction by utilizing the dependency of a four-wave mixing process on the relative angle between the light fields. A microscopic model for four-wave mixing in a Lambda-type level structure is introduced and compared to recent experimental data. We show that images with feature size as low as 10 micrometers can propagate with very little or even negative diffraction. The mechanism is completely different from that conserving the shape of spatial solitons in nonlinear media, as here diffraction is suppressed for arbitrary spatial profiles. At the same time, the gain inherent to the nonlinear process prevents loss and allows for operating at high optical depths. Our scheme does not rely on atomic motion and is thus applicable to both gaseous and solid media.
This work reports the experimental observation of a new type of four-wave mixing in which frequency-degenerate weak signal and idler waves are generated by mixing two pump waves of different frequencies in a normally dispersive birefringent optical fiber. This parametric frequency fusion is what we believed the first experimental evidence of inverse four-wave mixing.
We experimentally demonstrate stimulated four-wave mixing in two linearly uncoupled integrated Si$_3$N$_4$ micro-resonators. In our structure the resonance combs of each resonator can be tuned independently, with the energy transfer from one resonator to the other occurring in the presence of a nonlinear interaction. This method allows flexible and efficient on-chip control of the nonlinear interaction, and is readily applicable to other third-order nonlinear phenomena.
We investigate the effect of 2-beam coupling in different imaging geometries in generating intensity-difference squeezing from four-wave mixing (4WM) in Rb atomic vapors. A recently-introduced dual-seeding technique can cancel out the classical noise in a seeded four-wave mixing process. This dual-seeding technique, however, can introduce new complications that involve 2-beam coupling between different seeded spatial modes in the atomic vapor and can ruin squeezing at frequencies on the order of the atomic linewidth and below. This complicates some forms of quantum imaging using these systems. Here we show that seeding the 4WM process with skew rays can eliminate the excess noise caused by 2-beam coupling. To avoid 2-beam coupling in bright, seeded images, it is important to re-image the object in the gain medium, instead of focussing through it.
The unique linear and massless band structure of graphene, in a purely two-dimensional Dirac fermionic structure, have led to intense research spanning from condensed matter physics to nanoscale device applications covering the electrical, thermal, mechanical and optical domains. Here we report three consecutive first-observations in graphene-silicon hybrid optoelectronic devices: (1) ultralow power resonant optical bistability; (2) self-induced regenerative oscillations; and (3) coherent four-wave mixing, all at a few femtojoule cavity recirculating energies. These observations, in comparison with control measurements with solely monolithic silicon cavities, are enabled only by the dramatically-large and chi(3) nonlinearities in graphene and the large Q/V ratios in wavelength-localized photonic crystal cavities. These results demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of hybrid two-dimensional graphene-silicon nanophotonic devices for next-generation chip-scale ultrafast optical communications, radio-frequency optoelectronics, and all-optical signal processing.
We study topologically-protected four-wave mixing (FWM) interactions in a plasmonic metasurface consisting of a periodic array of nanoholes in a graphene sheet, which exhibits a wide topological bandgap at terahertz frequencies upon the breaking of time-reversal symmetry by a static magnetic field. We demonstrate that due to the significant nonlinearity enhancement and large lifetime of graphene plasmons in specific configurations, a net gain of FWM interaction of plasmonic edge states within the topological bandgap can be achieved with pump power of less than 10 nW. In particular, we find that the effective waveguide nonlinearity coefficient is about 1.1x10^13 1/(Wm), i.e., more than ten orders of magnitude larger than that of commonly used, highly nonlinear silicon photonic nanowires. These findings could pave a new way for developing ultra-low-power-consumption, highly-integrated and robust active photonic systems at deep-subwavelength scale for applications in quantum communications and information processing.