Effect of partial coherence on four-wave mixing in photorefractive materials via reflection grating approximation

We investigate the effect of beam coherence on four-wave mixing via reflection gratings in photorefractive media. For the case of phase conjugation, the results of our theoretical analysis indicate that partial coherence always leads to a drop of signal gain and phase conjugate reflectivity in non-depleted cases. In general, the mutual coherence of the signal beam and the pump beam can be enhanced due to the process of wave mixing. The mutual coherence of the phase conjugate beam and one of the pump beams depends on the beam intensity ratio as well as the optical path difference. This is distinctly different from the four-wave mixing case with a transmission grating. Received: 15 October 1999 / Revised version: 26 June 2000 / Published online: 7 February 2001