Area dependence of chirped-pulse stimulated Brillouin scattering: implications for stored light and dynamic gratings

Abstract

Brillouin dynamic gratings have applications ranging from sensing to slow and stored light. When transform-limited pump pulses are used, the grating strength and the efficiency of light storage and retrieval are a periodic function of pulse area and can be zero for areas that are an integer multiple of π. In this paper the dependence of the dynamic grating strength and retrieval efficiency on pulse area is investigated for chirped pulses. It is found that the presence of chirp relaxes the requirement imposed on the pulse area that it be an odd multiple of π/2 for maximum efficiency. Analytical results are presented for the dependence of grating strength on the pulse area for both chirped and unchirped pulses. A comparison is made with the analogous process of adiabatic rapid passage in two-level atomic systems.