Studying an advanced regime of the non-collinear two-phonon light scattering for applications to the optical spectrum analysis

Abstract

Principally new features of the non-collinear two-phonon light scattering governed by elastic waves of finite amplitude in birefringent bulk crystals are detected and observed. The main goals of our investigations are to reveal novel important details inherent in the nonlinearity of this effect and to study properties of similar parametric nonlinearity both theoretically and experimentally in wide-aperture crystals with moderate linear acoustic attenuation. An additional degree of freedom represented by the dispersive birefringence factor, which can be distinguished within this nonlinear phenomenon, is characterized. This physical degree of freedom gives us a one-of-a-kind opportunity to apply the strongly non-linear two-phonon light scattering in practice for the first time. The local unit-level maxima in the distribution of light scattered into the second order appear periodically as the acoustic power density grows. It makes possible to identify a few transfer function profiles peculiar to these maxima in the isolated planes of angular-frequency mismatches. These maxima give us an opportunity to choose the desirable profile for the transfer function at the fixed angle of incidence for the incoming light beam with a wide spectrum .The needed theoretical analysis is developed and proof-of-principle experiments, performed with a specially designed wide-aperture acousto-optical cell made of the calomel (α-Hg 2 Cl 2 ) crystal, are presented. The obtained spectral resolution ~0.235 A at 405 nm (i.e. the resolving power ~17,200) can be compared with the most advanced acousto-optical spectrometers for space/airborne operations. Evidently, our results with the calomel-based acousto-optical cell look like the best we can mention at the moment.