Intensity instability and correlation in amplified multimode wave mixing

Abstract

Abstract The dynamics of optical nonlinearity in the presence of gain and feedback can be complex leading to chaos in certain regimes. Temporal, spectral, spatial, or polarization instability of optical fields can emerge from chaotic response of an optical $$\chi ^{(2)}$$ χ ( 2 ) or $$\chi ^{(3)}$$ χ ( 3 ) nonlinear medium placed between two cavity mirrors or before a single feedback mirror. The complex mode dynamics, high-order correlations, and transition to instability in these systems are not well known. We consider a $$\chi ^{(3)}$$ χ ( 3 ) medium with amplified four-wave mixing process and study noise and correlation between multiple optical modes. Although individual modes show intensity instability, we observe relative intensity noise reduction close to the standard quantum noise, limited by the camera speed. We observe a relative noise reduction of more than 20 dB and fourth-order intensity correlation between four spatial modes. More than 100 distinct correlated quadruple modes can be generated using this process.