Accelerated two-wave mixing response in erbium-doped fibers with saturable optical absorption

Abstract

The contribution of the spatially uniform variation of average optical absorption to the dynamics of the transient two-wave mixing (TWM) response is considered. It is shown theoretically and confirmed experimentally that this transient effect, via dynamic population gratings in erbium-doped fibers (EDFs) can ensure a response nearly two times faster in such gratings as compared to the growth rate of fluorescence uniformly excited under similar conditions, and can also result in an additional overshot in the tail of the TWM response. This additional ‘accelerating’ contribution is of even type, and does not influence the odd transient TWM response for the refractive index component of such gratings in the EDFs reported earlier. It is also shown that this effect can be utilized to monitor the formation of the dynamic grating with an auxiliary probe wave of the essentially different non-Bragg wavelength.